Bedini Schoolgirl

[Aaron]

congrads!

Glad you got it working!

A few things for the efficiency is that you want as weak as magnets as possible but strong enough to just induce enough to trigger the base and also you want as much resistance at the base as possible while still letting the minimum through just to trigger the base.

The magnets you have look like the radio shack ones with the hole in the middle? Probably fine. Before you added more winds, it might have been possible to get it to run if you double stacked those magnets (with the fewer winds).

When you replace the resistor to 680, if it seems like it is difficult to get started, you can just double stack the magnets.

Anyway, post your results...looking forward to it. Also, you might see that when it gets going, it will speed up and start drawing up to the 1/4 amp you see, then it might start speeding up even more and the input might start dropping backwards. Kind of like shifting into higher gear but input drops.

I'll post a video of my roller skate wheel video...has about 600 turns. That is the very first one I ever did and it got me hooked! LOL

[Shamus]

Preliminary results

OK, now that I've swapped out the 10 ohm for a 680 ohm resistor the coil is running nice and cool. It might be better to advise using the 680 ohm first and fall back on the 10 ohm only as a last resort, since it seems to cause some serious coil heating. With the 680 ohm in place I do have to give it a pretty good spin to get it going, but that could be due to not enough turns on the coil, suboptimal bearings, unbalanced rotor, etc.

Now I'm getting some interesting results--before the 6V battery seemed to kick the 12V in the tail but now the 12V is doing amazing things! Here are some nominal measurements (these are crude BTW because my meter is kinda low end):

@ 6V: 70-80 mA, low RPM (guess-timate in the 100-300 range)
@12V: 150 mA, high RPM (guess-timate around double or so)

On one of those test runs with the 12V battery the rotor started spinning very fast (several times faster than the above measurement shows!) and I got a little nervous--I didn't want to have a magnet go flying into my chest at high velocity, tape or no tape. So I unhooked the battery and let it run down and decided to try again. This time it didn't spin up as fast and I couldn't get the coil as close to the rotor as before (definitely makes a difference in RPM!), so I shut it down again and found one side of one of the magnets had come loose. Apparently the glue I used doesn't bond well to ceramic magnets. So I got out the epoxy and glued it back down and tonight I gave a demonstration to my lovely wife (who doesn't know what to make of this stuff ) and it spun up to high RPM once more on the 12V battery. And, just my luck, another magnet came loose which put an end to tonights experimentation. I have a feeling I'm going to have reglue the entire rotor. Let this be a lesson to all of you experimenting with this thing: Make sure that you have some sturdy tape on the outside of your rotor--it will save you bacon!

At any rate, before the magnet came loose I was looking at the amp draw as the rotor spun up on the 12V battery. It started around 40 mA and then settled a bit around 100 mA. Then it took off; the draw was steadily climbing up to 190 mA as the RPM increased. Unfortunately, the noise from the bearings was making me nervous as it's a repurposed sliding glass door bearing meant for a vertical application and very low RPM--and here I have it horizontal and high RPM. I have a feeling it would have gone even faster and then the amps would probably settle back down. I'll have to get a box to put it into and just let it go as fast as it wants and see what happens.

After that, I'll just have to hang a diode between the coil and the collector and see what's there. I know there's definitely something there because one time as I was checking the transistor to see if it was heating up I accidentally shorted the collector and the base with my finger while it was running and received a pretty good bite--definitely more than 12 volts!

Ultimately I'd like to videotape the meter so I can make a nice graph of what's going on (basically amps vs. time, though I think amps vs. RPM would more interesting ). I guess before this is all over I'll have to find m'self a tachometer.

[Kevin]

Congrats Shamus!

Hey Shamus

Congrats on getting your BSG running!

I can testify, the magnets can do damage. I had one fly off my wheel and imbed itself in some drywall. After that, since I am using a bicycle wheel, I taped them each individually around the rim.

One relatively inexpensive tool that I use to measure the performance is a digital tachometer similar to the one found at this link:

NON CONTACT DIGITAL LASER PHOTO TACHOMETER - NEW - (item 220136890075 end time Aug-10-07 12:24:04 PDT)

Regarding your voltage, that is more expensive to measure, an oscilloscope can show you the voltage and the wave form.

I found the best on my current set-up is putting out about 180 volts (input is 12 volts).

Have fun!

[Shamus]

More results

@Aaron: I forgot to mention, yes, the magnets are the Radio Shack variety. Good eye!

@Kevin: Thanks for the heads up! I definitely want to measure RPM in my setup to get a better picture of what's going on. BTW, would you be willing to share some of your insights with the rest of us vis-a-vis improvements you've found? Or has Aaron already laid them all out above?

OK, if this is getting boring just let me know and I'll shuddap. Some more interesting results tonight: It seems that the bearing has a large influence over the performance of this little machine. I built an eight magnet rotor (for the next step--results to be posted in a different thread once it's built ) and the short of it is that it performs better than the six magnet rotor.

Some of the gains are probably due to the fact that the eight was built better than the six; where the six has slightly offset discs in relation to the bearing the eight is almost dead on and where on the six the magnets are attached to the edge slightly non-uniform (one of the magnets is visibly skewed WRT the vertical) on the eight I made sure that they were uniform.

At any rate, when I first put the eight-magnet rotor on it didn't start at all with either 6V or 12V--I thought that maybe the magnet spacing was insufficient. But then I thought that maybe the bearing hadn't loosened up enough (it's the same bearing as on the six-magnet rotor ) and thus broke out the spray lube. Once I did that, it spun up quite well to some fairly high RPM. The current draw was around 120 mA @ 6V.

I then went back to the six-magnet rotor and to my surprise it spun up pretty fast (albeit somewhat slowly) and drew about 90 mA @ 6V. This seemed fishy to me, so once again I reached for the can of spray lube and gave it spritz while it was running. Once I did that, it started going faster while the amps dropped to around 50-60 mA. On subsequent runs, it never got above 50 mA while the RPM seemed to be fairly moderate (no tach yet--!).

So, to sum up, the bearings play a fair sized role in the performance of this machine. The ones I'm using have a fair amount of slop in them--somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-3 degrees from vertical which is bad, bad, bad. You can actually see the six-magnet rotor precess at high RPM. Also, I had to reapply the spray lube to the eight-magnet rotor at least once, as during one run it spun up to the 120 mA point and then a few seconds later lost all power and stopped completely. Good bearings are vital!

On a side note, I was wondering if anyone knows where to get various odds and ends such as spools and bearings. Internet searches tend to lead either to OEMs and industrial suppliers or to wild goose chases. I did manage to find a few sealed pump bearings at the local neighborhood giant home improvement warehouse store. I also found some perfect spools there--too bad they had $7 worth of #18 stranded wire on them. Where is Tinkerer's Depot to be found?

[Kevin]

Shamus,

Your posts are NOT boring....it is exciting to hear of another traveling down the road of experimentation and discovering the same fantastic world of open systems!

Most everything I have done is from what Aaron, Peter or John have told me. I did TRV how to make it better, and got a few little tidbits that did improve output.

I have built several units, but the main one I used to document thousands of hours of charging batteries utilized a 12' diameter bicycle wheel. Standard bearings which I kept well greased.

Double stacked Radio Shack rectangular magnets. Magnets are placed the with the space of two magnets in between each magnet pair.

One coil, but wrapped with wires for TWO circuits.

I use a variable resistor for each circuit. This is so I can tune it for the optimum work put in to work output.

I use 12 volt deep cycle (85 amp hour) batteries. (I do have a few 12 volt car batteries that had been discarded because they were "dead" that are in the rotation also)

All my parts have been purchased at Radio Shack or Walmart or Digi-Key, (Digi-Key Corporation - USA Home Page) and I got my wire at a motor rebuilding business (they also had old spools sitting around, and I got a few of those from them).

As soon as I get 150 free hours (maybe this winter) I am going to build a larger unit. Right now the plan is for 8 coils and 32 circuits. My calculation is that I will be able to run my entire house off this unit.

[Shamus]

Time to move on

Thank you Aaron, and especially Kevin--the pieces are starting to fall into place! Of course it helps to have a copy of Free Energy Generation at hand. I didn't realize just how useful that photo gallery would be, especially when looking at John Bedini's site and wishing I had a closeup of some of his machines. This was a good first step, as all the things I've been reading about and seen are starting to come together as a coherent whole.

I have much more to say about the subject of the Bedini motor, but I think that this thread is probably not the right one to say it in. Having said that, I will say this: I started to make the next machine which will have four coils and four circuits (single-coil/multi-circuit will be the third iteration). But since it has only one coil and one circuit, you could consider it a SG motor. I was a bit disappointed to find that I could only get around 700 turns from my 1/2 lb spool of #22 wire--I was hoping to get at least 900. I guess it's back to the internet sites to get a 7 lb. (or thereabouts) spool.

At any rate, I got it running last night and let it run overnight just to see if it would, and it did. Even with the lousy bearing I have in the rotor. I put the diode in between the coil and the collector to see what was there and lo and behold I saw some voltage spikes peaking around 200V! Obviously my instrument is too slow to really see what's going on with that part of the circuit but it's enough to get an indication. Needless to say, it's a bit stunning to see it for the first time.

And since at this point we're no longer talking about the basic schoolgirl design, I will continue this discussion in a more appropriate thread. Complete with pictures, too!

[Kevin]

Hi Shamus

Thanks so much for the update. You are getting me excited to build my bigger unit....I have actually been thinking about doing it an hour here and there instead of waiting for a big block of time.

Hey! Have you touched your wire with your finger yet...the wire that is producing the voltage spikes?

Over my time of tuning I did quite a few times! Even though it is low amperage, 170-220 volts is quite a zap.

Looking forward to your next update!

[Shamus]

Struggling through the concept

@Kevin: If you didn't see my encouragement in the other thread, let me reiterate here--by all means do it an hour at a time if you have to and please post updates!

Ok, here's what I see happening in this little circuit.

What follows is my take on what happens during one cycle. When Mr. Bedini said that his monopole motor was an attraction motor, something just didn't sit right with me. But, of course, now I realize he was right:

With no current flow in the circuit, a rotor magnet is a attracted to the coil core and moves toward it. This induces a tiny current in both coil wires. Electrons flow from the back of the trigger coil to the front, through the resistor and diode and back the the rear of the trigger coil. If enough current is present, it also flows through the base of the transistor and into the power coil.

Once the base of the transistor has current flowing through it, current from the battery flows from the negative terminal of the battery, through the emitter of the transistor and out the collector, then through the rear of the coil and out the front to the positive terminal of the battery. At this point, the current flowing through the coil creates a strong magnetic field, temporarily magnetizing the coil core with a north pole in front and a south pole in back. This gives the rotor magnet a good strong kick in the direction it was traveling.

With the rotor magnet kicked away, there is no more induced current in the coil. Current flow at the base of the transistor stops and so the current path from the battery, through the transistor, is interrupted. At this point the magnetic field in the coil collapses and, coupled with the brief amount of time that the coil was energized by the battery, a radiant event occurs in the coil accompanied by a high amount of voltage appearing with no current. As the next magnet on the rotor comes in, it is attracted to the coil core and the cycle repeats itself.

Now this is what I'm seeing, but I could be flat out wrong. I'm just groping for an explanation of how this little thing works. One counterexample is in the Bedini/Beaden PPA where there is a picture of a waveform showing current in the trigger side of the circuit, one which strongly suggests a type of "ringing" oscillation as the current ramps up. Which means that my explanation, while plausible, fails to explain the ringing oscillation of that picture. Obviously, there are still some gaps in my knowledge here.

[Aaron]

Bedini Circuits are GAS VALVES

Hi Shamus,

This isn't a direct response to you post...it is something I posted 2.5 years ago in icubenetwork when it was online in relation to John's circuits and the water fuel cells. But, it applies to these circuits and is a perspective hardly anyone is talking about yet.

---------------------------------------------------

qiman13
Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 4:09 pm Post subject: coil importance

The coil is extremely important. There is not one single component
or aspect of this schematic that is not that important. Every
piece is crucial to consider. That becomes apparent when you
start to fine tune the energizer. A few ohms difference in the
resistor at the base can make a big difference in efficiency.

Impedance matching is important. You have to think of the circuit
as a gas pressure control system, since the aether acts exactly
like a gas under pressure.

For example, on one motor I just put together, with a 12volt
1.5 amp hour gel cell battery on one side and a 6volt on the output
smaller amp hour..the motor gets up to about 2600 rpm and
outputs so much radiant. That is because with the higher
impedance on the back end, it is acting like a pressure relief valve
with a tight spring. The motor can only open up so much.

When I put the same kind of battery on the back end 12volt, etc...
The energizer speeds up to 4800 rpm and output a hell of a lot
more radiant into the battery. That is because it is like having a
pressure relief valve with a looser spring or you can picture it
having the ports on a head bored up or having racing headers
instead of a stock exhaust manifold. It lets more out with less
back pressure.

That is what is happening. It isn't an electrical schematic, it is a
device that moves the Heaviside flow around under different
pressures. It is a valve for gas.

[Aaron]

scalar south

Shamus,

I think you're very intuitive with this.

I was thinking the same thing with the collapsed field attracting the north. Have you seen John's pics of the fields around the rotor.

Think maybe on this one that squeezing out in between each magnet is a "scalar south" field. All the souths facing inwards are repelling and have nowhere to go but out between the magnets. Not only that.... if you take two identical magnets and put north up and space them a bit apart, there is a south field coming out between the two.

There gets a point where the speed is such that as the north field is out and possibly hasn't collapsed yet, the south field is attracted to that

I suppose there are different ways to look at that but get a compass or other magnets and experiment with feeling the south coming between the magnets

[Shamus]

More bloviation

A small shipment of magnet wire came in the other day and so I finally got to wind up a 1,000 turn coil. I've been reduced to fabricating my own spools from PVC pipe and other odd pieces of scrap and scratching my head trying to figure out how to keep flanges of the spools from falling off once too many turns are on it. I'm still waiting for the 11 lb. spool...

Since I didn't have any batteries hanging off of the diode, I figured this thread would be appropriate to post some more preliminary results. I apologize for the paucity of hard data, but I just don't have enough meters to do the job. At any rate, starting the rotor with the 1,000 turn coil is much easier. Running 12V, the current draw consistently went to 230 mA while when running 6V, the current draw was consistently 90 mA (margin of error is +/- 10 mA). I did test the 6-magnet rotor with the new coil at 12V and it drew a steady 210 mA (didn't check 6V).

(slightly-offtopic)I did check to see if the rotor RPM would drop with a load and it did as I've seen it do before.(/slightly-offtopic) It's interesting that the 12V battery draws more than twice the current of the 6V battery with the same setup. I guess that means that the resistance I have set up on the trigger side (680 ohms, 'natch) is more closely matched (or 'tuned') to the 6V battery than to the 12V. The resistor isn't soldered in yet, so this calls for some experimentation. One thing I notice about John Bedini's circuits is that there are no pots in any of them. Apparently he knows his coils/circuits well enough to choose an appropriate resistance and leave it at that.

One other item of note is that the current consumption seems to only go up no matter what voltage I put on it. Which of course makes me wonder if my setup is correct, since it's supposed to speed up and then have the current draw go down. But then again, perhaps that effect can't and/or doesn't occur in a single coil setup--I'm eager to get the multi-coil going. It also could be that I have lousy bearings and that the motor is trying to overcome that but just can't.

In answer to your question, Aaron, yes, I have seen John's picture of the magnetic fields around the rotor. It's funny, I always assumed those spokes were north fields. It sheds a whole new light on things to see that those are south fields! Yes, I tried magnets in those spaces and I have to tell you, it was a little freaky to see the north face of a free magnet stick in between two rotor magnets which, as you know, are north facing out! John was right when he said this machine was deceptively simple.

[Shamus]

Results of changing base resistance

Ok, first the results, then the analysis:

Value (ohms)  Measured  mA@12V  Notes
---------------------------------------------------------------------
680           678       230
820           818       210
1200          1184      170
1200+180      1363.6    150
1200+180+2.2  1366.6    150
1200+180+10   1374.3    150     Hung at 140 mA then stayed at 150 mA
1200+180+15   1379.4    150     Low resonance once spinning, spun up to high RPM; 120 mA with load
1200+180+22   1386.6    190     Weak resonance, low pitch, spun up to low RPM
1200+180+33   1397.1    190     Resonance, lower pitched, spun up to low RPM
1200+180+39   1403.3    190     Resonance, lower pitched, spun up to low RPM
1200+270      1452              Resonance, lower pitched, would not spin up
1200+390      1584              Resonance, lower pitched, would not spin up
1800          1784              370 mA resonance seen, went negative (!) amps, no resonance after that; would not spin up
2700          2680              Resonance, higher pitched, would not spin up
.

It was pretty surprising to find self-resonant behavior--I can see how people could get distracted by it. It's also easy to see why the coil resists the rotor in that mode, since the circuit no longer self-regulates at that point. The rotor would have to be turning at the resonant frequency to stay spinning!

My meter can only measure down two significant digits at these amperages, so I'm pretty sure there's some differentiation at those levels marked 150 mA. In particular, I'm thinking that 1374.3 ohm is probably closer to 150 mA than the other values.

I'm also finally seeing the 'shifting into high gear' phenomenon that you were talking about, Aaron, with the power consumption going down as the RPM goes up. It seems tuning is the key here.

[amigo]

Hello everyone,

Thought to make a first post here since I will have some questions about my contraption that I've built...I mean Bedini Motor. I can say that it actually works but I have some questions/concerns that I'd like feedback on.

I will soon post photos of my motor as well as my Fluke scope waveform because one of the questions relates to the signal, right now I just thought to make a first post...

[Aaron]

Bedini SG youtube video

Bedini SG (roller skate wheel motor) video posted on youtube.

YouTube - Bedini SG - Schoolgirl - Bare basic model

[Shamus]

Strangeness

A few days ago I got some sealed lead-acid 12V batteries rated at 7Ah and so today I decided to give it a shot. I checked the resting voltage of the battery I was going to use and it was sitting at 12.80V. I tried to measure the amps coming out of it but I nearly burned up my wires in trying to do so. I think the meter was reading around 15A or so before I realized what was happening to my wires.

So anyway, I hooked it up to my setup (with 1374 ohms) and got lots of noise out of my coil and strong repulsion on the rotor. The amp reading was negative. Something strange was going on here...

So I pulled off the resistors and stuck what I thought was 680 ohm resistor in and this time it spun right up. The current draw was around 540 mA (!) while the RPM was low. Well, it turns out that I mistook a black band for brown and so it was really 68 ohms on the trigger. A bit on the low side.

I then put an honest-to-God 680 ohm resistor in place and it showed resonance right away. No chance of starting the rotor there. I substituted a 390 ohm and this time no resonance in the coil although the current draw was around 390 mA with an RPM somewhere in the middle range of what I've seen with this setup.

With around 490 ohms the RPM did go up while the draw went to around 360 mA. I had to stop testing, though, because I noticed that the resistors were getting extremely hot! Now these are only rated at 1/4W, but still, there shouldn't be that much juice flowing on the trigger side, should there? I mean, we're talking mV/mA range here on the trigger side. At any rate, I'm off to get some beefier resistors so I don't have to worry about them burning up.

On a side note, I figured it might be useful to power this thing from a stock wall-wart PSU. I found one rated for 9VDC at 1A, but it turns out these labels lie. I measured 12.83V coming out (hey, it looks just like a fresh battery! ) at around 5A or so. So after my experiments with the lead-acid battery came to a screeching halt, I decided to try to power the current setup (at 490 ohms) with the PSU. It spun up to high RPM with only around a 270 mA draw.

Now I'm really confused here. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that the battery, with it's higher amps, should be pushing more current through this circuit than the PSU which is putting out about three times less amps. But it seems like the current draw should be the same, no?

On another side note, there's a good lesson here about resistor selection. It seems that the optimal resistance depends heavily on the voltage being supplied on the front end. I checked the voltage on the 12V battery (made up of 1.5V cells) and it was around 10.5V. Boy, do I feel foolish. (/me smacks forehead)