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Author Topic: To be deleted...  (Read 66877 times)

nul-points

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To be deleted...
« on: January 10, 2016, 08:52:09 PM »
Bonne année, overunity people!

Got to laugh at the complexity and/or 'scientific' foundation of recent flashlight/lantern offerings from points East

For all you frustrated replicators/hopeful customers, here's a little seasonal present to keep you amused while you wait for something/anything worthwhile to come of yet more fruitless effort, or waste of $100

So - this is my offering in the world of flashlights:  use flyback energy to charge a second battery via LED(s)

Ok, nothing novel, there - except....

Here's a little demonstrator i put together this weekend - and as a 'starter for 10', it's not looking too shabby!

This example uses only 1 AAA 750mAh NiMH as an input 'battery', a similar cell as output, and a single Hi-brite white LED as the lamp - the same type of circuit arrangement could be used for additional cells and LEDs

The circuit is based on a flyback switchmode PSU arrangement  (in this case, a Boost Converter), B2 gets charged with the same flyback current pulses illuminating LED1.

After operating the flashlight sufficiently to discharge B1, the switch S1 can be toggled to swap the i/p & o/p cells/batteries and the process repeats.

Obviously, this arrangement will extend the use of the flashlight, compared to the same initial charge supplied to a single cell without the recharge circuitry

If you wish to experiment with this configuration, you'll see that my circuit is pretty much generic - the transistors i've used have been either high-gain, low power, eg BC337, or medium power, eg BFY51.  Transformer T1 needs sufficient turns ratio to swtch Q1 reliably, my T1 is a Maplin Ferrite Toroid, approx 30mm OD x 25mm high, using 0.45mm magnet wire.  No pulse timing, this thing oscillates at the natural frequency of the assembled parts (approx 500kHz, in my case). Inductor L1 (approx 2.5mH here) may not be necessary, it's a legacy from other stuff i've been doing,  C1 is helping to buffer the input supply, i use a 1500uF electrolytic.  Diodes are Schottky, type BAT42,

I don't think any components are critical or unusual - i have introduced an air-gap into the toroid, mostly as a salute to the late Harold Aspden!  ;-)

I'm hoping to attach the schematic and a sample datalog graph of the discharge/charging voltage trends - i was going to take a photo of my scrappy build, to give an idea of the LED intensity, but i just found (ironically) that both my batteries for my camera are discharged so that will have to wait.  The LED is bright enough to block visual sight of the layout when viewed from approx half a metre above.

PS ...although the graph may LOOK as if the flashlight is already OU, with the charging cell voltage slope being steeper than the discharging cell slope, obviously further (and certainly more rigourous) testing would be required to establish the efficiency of the system

However - this system works - its cheap, simple ...and it's likely to be a whole lot more efficient than some of the offerings being touted as OU!

Enjoy  :-)

np

http://docsfreelunch.blogspot.co.uk/

« Last Edit: January 10, 2016, 11:45:48 PM by nul-points »

SkyWatcher123

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #1 on: January 11, 2016, 05:24:02 AM »
Hi nul-points, thanks for sharing.
I'm working on my own version right now.
Mine will use a gutted filament type led bulb, 3.6 watt, 450 lumen type.
Using flyback ferrite core.
I have around bifilar 220 turn primary oscillator, 6 layers, using 24awg. magnet wire.
Using 3.7 volt lithium ion cell.
Hopefully the 220 turn primary will give some good high voltage spikes to light the 120 volt led bulb to decent brightness and charge the second cell good, we shall see.
peace love light :)
Edit: oh and for now, i will just manually swap lithium ion cells, until i get proper switches.
 

nul-points

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #2 on: January 11, 2016, 06:51:30 AM »
...
I'm working on my own version right now.
Mine will use a gutted filament type led bulb, 3.6 watt, 450 lumen type.
Using flyback ferrite core.
I have around bifilar 220 turn primary oscillator, 6 layers, using 24awg. magnet wire.
Using 3.7 volt lithium ion cell.
Hopefully the 220 turn primary will give some good high voltage spikes to light the 120 volt led bulb to decent brightness and charge the second cell good...
 i will just manually swap lithium ion cells, until i get proper switches.

Hey Mr T

that sounds like a cool build - and i know that it will be a good quality one!

...hmmm - that's just reminded me that i have an AA single-cell-powered JT-driven lamp (using a 220V LED 50mm halogen spot replacement bulb) kindly given to me by old OU buddy Nerzh Dishual, when we exchanged project builds a few years back...  ;-)

i look forward to hearing the results you get with your project - i've had good indications already on mine, even with this minimalist version

How do Li-ion batteries interface to flyback spikes?  I've only ever tried NiMH, NiCad & SLA, all of which have been fine at low charging rates in earlier unrelated projects

Keep us posted!
np
 

SkyWatcher123

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #3 on: January 11, 2016, 08:23:38 PM »
Hi nul-points, I'm having good indications with mine as well.
However, had to use 2 warm white top hat leds in series, not enough voltage for the 120 volt led bulb.
I think a secondary coil with more turns and then use the 120 volt led bulb as diode to charge lithium cell might work.
Not sure how well that would charge the single lithium ion cell, considering the voltage will be higher, whereas the 2 leds in series probably drops the voltage down from the primary flyback.
I also have mine, for now, with the 2 leds off the collector into positive of charge cell and negative of cell to common of circuit.
The voltages seem to be tracking very closely, as far as the loss on input and gain on charging cell.
The lithium cells seem to take the charge fine, of course they are larger capacity and take about 2 hours at the 20 milliamp input to go from 3.93 to 3.94 volts.
peace love light

TinselKoala

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #4 on: January 12, 2016, 07:55:34 AM »
Nice work, Doc! The graph is particularly good to see. We are so rarely given real data to chew on. Keep up the good work!

nul-points

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #5 on: January 12, 2016, 08:49:22 AM »
...I'm having good indications with mine as well.
However, had to use 2 warm white top hat leds in series, not enough voltage for the 120 volt led bulb.
I think a secondary coil with more turns and then use the 120 volt led bulb as diode to charge lithium cell might work.
Not sure how well that would charge the single lithium ion cell, considering the voltage will be higher, whereas the 2 leds in series probably drops the voltage down from the primary flyback.
I also have mine, for now, with the 2 leds off the collector into positive of charge cell and negative of cell to common of circuit.
The voltages seem to be tracking very closely, as far as the loss on input and gain on charging cell.
The lithium cells seem to take the charge fine, of course they are larger capacity and take about 2 hours at the 20 milliamp input to go from 3.93 to 3.94 volts.
...

You've given yourself some interesting challenges there, SW, right off the bat!  :-)

But it will be a nice piece of kit when it all comes together.

I suspect that if you can get the intended lamp drive sorted first, to your own satisfaction,  then the Li-ion charging will sort of fall into place

Some useful comparative discussion by Maxim chip co. in the following link about relative pros & cons of charging Li-ion by switched, linear & pulsed methods - might be some useful pointers or confirmation there if you haven't seen it already (just for the issues, i mean, not that you might use their chips!)
  https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/913#

The high-from-low voltage requirement sounds like a job for the old auto spark generator arrangement of coupled coils (aka 'auto-transformer'?) , looks like a transformer, but is driven by flyback action (might be similar to Tesla coil behaviour?)

Your system is going to have a good energy density!  ...looking forward to hearing how it develops


Thanks for comments, TK - appreciated!

np
 


fritz

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #6 on: January 12, 2016, 03:11:59 PM »

There is a charge / discharge graph for NiMH chemistry, fig5

http://www.cobasys.com/pdf/tutorial/InsideNimhBattery/inside_nimh_battery_technology.html


Between 50% and 80%, the figures are parallel, 70mV spacing.






SkyWatcher123

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #7 on: January 12, 2016, 09:20:49 PM »
Hi nul-points, oh and i just realized you were quoting crocodile dundee, lol.
Well, i swiped the tv flyback coil/core i had in one of my lamps for testing, as it lighted the led bulb in question to good brightness, though it uses a 30awg. secondary coil.
As i suspected and you must have suspected as well, i need a separate step down transformer in line with the led bulb/secondary coil, since the lithium is not taking the higher voltage charge well, compared to the setup more like yours.
Maybe i will try nimh cells and see how they charge with the higher voltage.
peace love light

nul-points

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #8 on: January 13, 2016, 12:10:14 AM »
Thanks for the link, fritz - interesting to step back in time and see what wonderful things a 'New Technology' was about to achieve.  Useful background info about the Chemistry of these cells, too, although i always get funny looks these days when i finally manage to include the word 'stoichiometry' into the conversation!  ;-)

I guess you noticed that my graph above is equivalent to a small section of Fig 5 from your link (albeit my data represents 2 seperate cells, not the same one)

Hi nul-points, oh and i just realized you were quoting crocodile dundee, lol.
Well, i swiped the tv flyback coil/core i had in one of my lamps for testing, as it lighted the led bulb in question to good brightness, though it uses a 30awg. secondary coil.
As i suspected and you must have suspected as well, i need a separate step down transformer in line with the led bulb/secondary coil, since the lithium is not taking the higher voltage charge well, compared to the setup more like yours.
Maybe i will try nimh cells and see how they charge with the higher voltage.
peace love light

Lol, my boys used to love that film - CD: "what day is it Wal?".... Wal: "doesn't know, doesn't care!"

Anyway, where were we?  ...oh yeah - saving the world....

Luke Skywatcher, you be careful with them high voltages! 

I'm not sure that NiMHs would be any more forgiving than Li-ion -  it's all stoichiometry in the end

...hmmm - you see?  'stoichiometry' - conversation killer!

If you think of voltage as 'head of pressure', then you can usefully lose some across the LED stack, just have to make sure you leave around the necessary headroom for pulsing the battery - a series inductor might be your friend here

Alternatively, you could flyback charge, via your LED, the smallest cap which will still store a suitable packet of energy for transfer to the Li-ion and switch a transformer primary across the cap to get turns ratio less volts through some diodes (Schottky) as a charge pulse

Just thinking out loud - i think you're way ahead of me!  :)

 I'm currently going for a clean run on a charge/discharge graph - 23 hours down and if this rate continues it'll be around another day & a half before i can swap the 2 cells.  Meanwhile my LED continues to light up a circle on my ceiling.

 ...it's at times like these that i wish i'd paid more attention at my hand-shadow puppetry classes

np
 

SkyWatcher123

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #9 on: January 13, 2016, 03:41:20 AM »
Hi nul-points, goo-day mate, hehe.
No, i actually think i'm getting too far ahead of myself.
Carry on with your version, as it seemed to work the best, as far as my tests have shown.
I'll have to give more thought to the step back down idea.
In the meantime, i ventured back to the Rene re-emf charger idea.
So in my case, 2 lithium cells in series charging directly another lithium cell, with transistor and primary of blocking oscillator in line and of course lighting the led bulb off secondary.
I am swapping the single lithium charging cell periodically with one of the input series cells, it seems to be working well so far.
Anyway, carry on, i don't want to distract further from what you are doing.
peace love light

nul-points

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #10 on: January 13, 2016, 05:51:40 PM »
Hi nul-points, goo-day mate, hehe.
...
I'll have to give more thought to the step back down idea.
In the meantime, i ventured back to the Rene re-emf charger idea.
So in my case, 2 lithium cells in series charging directly another lithium cell, with transistor and primary of blocking oscillator in line and of course lighting the led bulb off secondary.
I am swapping the single lithium charging cell periodically with one of the input series cells, it seems to be working well so far.
...

Ha, g'day Skywatcher

Ok, no worries - i hadn't heard of Rene's charger, but i've seen (and experimented witb) others which use 2 to charge 1

I decided to stick with the same storage size on both i/p & o/p to make it easier to swap the batteries electrically, but otherwise it's the same idea

I like your idea of creating a lantern, or reading lamp - i'm not expecting to get much more than a pocket-flashlight thing going

All the best, keep us posted
np
 

citfta

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #11 on: January 14, 2016, 03:33:11 PM »
Thanks so much for such a simple and worthwhile circuit.  I have mine together and it seems to be working great.  I only had a very small LED so I will be looking for some larger ones to try.  My charge battery is gaining voltage nicely while only drawing 30 ma from the run battery.   Will keep you posted as I learn more.

Thanks again,
Carroll

nul-points

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #12 on: January 14, 2016, 07:13:26 PM »
Thanks so much for such a simple and worthwhile circuit.  I have mine together and it seems to be working great.  I only had a very small LED so I will be looking for some larger ones to try.  My charge battery is gaining voltage nicely while only drawing 30 ma from the run battery.   Will keep you posted as I learn more.

hi Carroll, pleased to hear you've got a circuit going!  I have a couple of circuits running at the moment - one uses a regular panel-mount type LED, hi-brite, that circuit only draws 10+mA but it's still quite bright to look into the lamp - the other circuit has a board-mount 1 Watt LED and can give brighter illumination at higher currents, so this might be a good LED type for you if you want to draw around 30mA

The current draw can be adjusted with VR1, so you can choose the current to suit the LED - obviously the battery discharge time decreases with increased brightness/current, but we're aiming to extend the usefulness of one 'external' charge by recharging 'internally' somewhat (a few times?)

Since the circuit is recharging one battery whilst discharging the other, our external charges shouldn't need to be more  than either:-

a) 1 battery fully charged, one discharged
b) 2 batteries, each half-charged

all the best with your experiments
np
 

SoManyWires

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #13 on: January 15, 2016, 07:55:21 PM »
hi Carroll, pleased to hear you've got a circuit going!  I have a couple of circuits running at the moment - one uses a regular panel-mount type LED, hi-brite, that circuit only draws 10+mA but it's still quite bright to look into the lamp - the other circuit has a board-mount 1 Watt LED and can give brighter illumination at higher currents, so this might be a good LED type for you if you want to draw around 30mA

The current draw can be adjusted with VR1, so you can choose the current to suit the LED - obviously the battery discharge time decreases with increased brightness/current, but we're aiming to extend the usefulness of one 'external' charge by recharging 'internally' somewhat (a few times?)

Since the circuit is recharging one battery whilst discharging the other, our external charges shouldn't need to be more  than either:-

a) 1 battery fully charged, one discharged
b) 2 batteries, each half-charged

all the best with your experiments
np

very nice work there chief!
thankyou for sharing this.

(much applause sound here)

nul-points

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Re: "...that's not a knife - THIS is a knife!!!" ...er, OU flashlight
« Reply #14 on: January 16, 2016, 04:43:57 AM »
 
thanks SMW, glad you like


ok - here are some preliminary results to see whether this type of approach is worth investigating more

first, a few general observations about the energy capacity of these NiMH cells used here:

- a fully charged cell can provide its Ah rating starting at an initial voltage of approx 1.4V and finishing at a practical discharged voltage of approx 1.2V
*
- a resting terminal voltage of 1.3V represents approx 50% charge remaining in the cell

- with a resistive load, the total energy supplied by these 750mAh cells, between full charge and discharge would be approx 1.3V x 0.75Ah = 0.98 Wh

you can see from the attached graph that Vb2 started and ended at approx 1.3V - therefore it started and finished with an approx 50% charge - its end voltage (1.31V) was only slightly higher than its initial voltage, so i'm going to ignore it in our energy accounting (although it made a real contribution in extending the runtime of the flashlight)

the 'flashlight' was illuminated at the same setting for 96 hours - the average current draw for the circuit was approx 10mA

cell B1 was connected as input for the first 80 hours of operation, and it discharged to 1.3V - this would normally be the 50% charge point, but we can see that this cell started at approx 1.45V, so it may be that it had supplied a little more than 50% of its expected capacity

 by this point, cell B1 had supplied approx 800 mAh, both illuminating the LED and charging cell B2 from 1.3V to 1.35V

After the 80 hour point, cells B1 & B2 were swapped between input & output every 1 or 2 hours, for a further 16 hours

the terminal voltage of cell B1 was recharged back above 1.3V for all of this 16 hour period

so, the outcome of this test was that effectively the length of time before cell B1 terminal voltage fell below 1.3V was extended by at least 16 hours and the total amp-hours supplied to the circuit was 960mAh up to an approx 50% charged point

using an 'area under the curve' calculation, and a dual-slope approximation to the discharge graph, the total energy expended by the flyback flashlight for the duration of the test was approx 1.3Wh - and it only used just over half of the charge in cell B1

when you compare this with the expected total capacity of the cell (ie. a full charge) of approx 1Wh, this approach is definitely worth investigating more!

np