My Solid State Adventure

[Brian McNece]

I'm starting this thread to post my experiments with solid state devices that have blossomed out of my research with the Bedini energizer. In 2009 my son was looking for a science fair project, so we were doing some searching on the net and came across the monopole group over at Yahoo. The Bedini energizer offered to rejuvenate batteries and extend there over all life span, my son and I were both intrigued to say the least. So I helped him build the device itself, (you'll see it in the video below) and he did all the charge/discharge cycles himself, kept very good records and put together a fabulous display for the science fair. He won the overall grand champion award. After the science fair was over we continued to charge and discharge batteries with it, some of them were 10-15 years old and we saw them coming back to life and some of them better than new.
Over time he got interested in other things, my interest continued. Though electronics was never a strong suit in my life, observing others on the forums and a few you tube videos, and a lot of practice, i have made some progress.
"Fast Forward to present" I had heard different folks talk about solid state devices, they seemed quite mysterious and a tad to complex for my ability levels. Until i started reading a thread (My Mode 3 - In Action) by a gentleman who goes by BobZilla on this forum. Between him and Min2oly they seemed to take a lot of the mystery and complexity out of it. So, following along with what Bob had shown I was able to put together a solid state charging device, (i might add I was quite pleased with myself and thankful to Bob for sharing his device) very much similar to his. Once I had that working then I was able to put together a Solid State Cap Dumper, once again based on what Bob had shown (I think Min2oly did too).
The video showing my charger is in that thread, post #117. So now for the Cap Dumper, (Some of what is below I cut and pasted from the other thread)
I got the cap dumper finished tonight, it consists of 2 470 uf and 4 4700 uf capacitors ( all 100 volt), 4 switches, a solid state relay, and an arduino. It is basically configured like the one Bob showed earlier in the thread. Thanks Bob.
The picture is of my test run, making sure it works.



The big drops are when i changed the off time, the smaller down spikes are when i would take a capacitor out of the mix.
Overall, I am very pleased, it needs some tuning but that just involves some time.
The battery started at 12.54 and stopped at 13.34 in about a 2 hour test run.
This picture is just of my notes taken throughout the 2 hour run.



I made a video of most of the first run, at the end of the video I say I'll be back, however, my camera battery died before i finished, but you'll get the idea. hope you enjoy it
Feel free to post comments or questions.
I am planning on posting more of these experiments, now that I have learned how to make and post videos and pictures.

https://youtu.be/wJ4MNpO4HDw

[BobZilla]

Hi Brian,
Hey great work on that cap dumper. I like your methodology for testing the various capacities in that video. As you run through these different settings your going to start gaining a lot of knowledge. I'm not going to comment too much just yet about try this or that because I want you to follow your own path but once you have all of the fundamentals understood I would be happy to show you some of the more complex approaches.

I will say to keep in mind that the batteries matter a great deal as well. It has to do with the impedance (and other things). What I mean is do not start to think one particular timing is perfect because as you change to a larger battery or a smaller one you will find so do the outcomes. Just as you are studying the effects of more and less capacity on the caps, the same kind of variances happen with changing of the batteries. What you want to do is study and learn the characteristics of changing this or that, so that you can apply the right timing and capacitance to whatever your working with.

Also now that you are working with large capacitors I suggest you get yourself a bleeder resistor to keep on hand. Occasionally as your experimenting you may accidentally charge those caps up more than you intended to and you need a way to bring them back down. A light bulb won't work because if you go to high on voltage it will just pop the filament so what you want is a 100 ohm 2 watt resistor or similar. I always keep one with an alligator clip wire around. If your caps get to high for any reason you just short them through the resistor to drain them down. This is also handy when you want to change how many of your caps your using. Throwing those switches on live caps will wear out the switch contacts because of the arc'ing and it's just a little unsettling sometimes. Better to drain your caps down smoothly with the resistor first.

This is great work your doing, thanks for sharing with the group.

[Brian McNece]

I had a little time this afternoon to play with the cap dumper, the chart is below, it took just under a half hour. The bumps in the graph are when i remove a cap. I find that feeding it with my energizer if i go down to just the base capacitor the charging slows down. I need to get another arduino to run the solid state pulsar or figure out how to get one arduino to do both, it might be simpler to just get another board.

[Brian McNece]

I had a nice long weekend, so I built another solid state charger, just like the other one with one exception, it is a tri-filar of 2 20 ga. And 1 21 ga. I thought it was all 20ga. But when i measured it i realized the one spool was not, oh well it still works fine. I have only tried it with one wire so far and it works good, draws just a little over 200 ma. And charges nicely.
I was also playing around with the backpopping coils, i was running the charger off a ten farad audio capacitor and then feeding the back pop coils back to the capacitors.
My back pop coils put out approx 28.50 volts dc of the bridge rectifier, however, it will not Keep the cap charged up.
Next thing is to feed the cap dumper with the solid state charger.
I built the second charger due to a comment the min2oly suggested.
When i built the first one and it worked so nicely, he suggested not changing a thing on the unit, thus ,i built a second one instead of doing any changes to the first one. I will post some pics soon or a video of it running.

[BobZilla]

Hi Brian,
You did the right thing not messing with the other one. I have cannibalized a lot of my machines and regretted it later at some point.

I tell you what, about the one wire that is a smaller gauge. Later on when you have time do some experiments with that coil by observing two setups,,, try one way with both of the 20AWG in parallel and then swap one out for the 21 and study that. I have found that it is beneficial, especially when there is a greater variance. I discovered it when using coils from wheeled machines on ss that had both trigger and power windings.

You might be interested in this older video from this thread now that your building SS. This one has exactly that setup, 2 power and one trigger but put in parallel (cannibalized coil from an old rig) . Most people might argue that once you put that smaller wire in parallel then it just all becomes exactly the same but in my opinion, no it doesn't. Especially with the high frequencies that we get into with digital programed switching. I belive it sets up some resonance that otherwise would not be there if they were all exactly the same.

http://www.energyscienceforum.com/showthread.php?t=1860

[ZPDM]

Great stuff Brian, I will mention on a related note that I finally got around to topping off "sealed" la batteries with colloidal silver, the thinking being the Ag+ will migrate to the anode and provide a superior conduction path. Of course it could also interfere with battery chemistry, but I suppose you might have silver sulfate as easy as lead sulfate for all I know. Early results are promising. First let me mention something not to do, don't just put some silver powder in the cells, I realized pretty quickly that I had just bridged the cells, maybe ala Ms,. Swift I can shake it off but I think it just wrecks the battery. After topping off electrolyte with pretty thick colloidal silver in filtered water, I didn't measure the ppm, but ran the Ag until it was darkly cloudy, I charged and discharged the battery now three times. This last time it ran up to 7.93V with Bedini radiant (one diode) charging. I haven't done this enough to know if this is unusual but it is encouraging, of course it doesn't settle there, but similar six volts seem not to not go quite to this voltage. It also seems to hold power well. What I'm doing now is radiantly charging a colloidal and a regular SLAB to however high they go then discharging both through a set resistance to try and get an idea of how much power each has, will also look to track time to charge for each after depleted. I can say at this point it looks like I didn't make things worse, it does at first glance look better, maybe it was also just topping off the electrolyte that helped so I will look into that as well. If it holds up I'll try and make a quick video and maybe start a thread. Thanks for your report and awesome that your son won the science fair.

[Brian McNece]

I had a little time in the shop tonight, i have been trying to charge a large battery (105ah) with the solid state charger, it is climbing slowly. I decided to play around with frequency on the mc. I just kept adjusting till it seemed to charge good without pulling high amps. It settled in around 1.1amps @ 180 hz.. The coil was humming. The charging did pick up a little. We'll see where it is tomorrow. No pics or videos tonight.

Bob
I was watching some of your old videos and heard you say something that i have experienced also with my meters, just out of the blue the usb connection gets lost and i have to restart them and lose my chart.

[BobZilla]

Hey Brian,
Sorry buddy I did not notice you made this new post.

Now that you are gaining more experiance it might be worth the effort to go back and look at some of what I said back when you had all the trouble with the first SSR that didn't work right. What I am getting at is for you to understand proper coil loading, not that your doing anything wrong and perhaps you do already understand but I had given you specific instruction on tuning for a coil with the MC. IN short I will repeat here a little.

You do not want to over saturate your coil ( or under saturate). Get yourself a neon if you don't have one so that you can tune. Set your off time for a very long period so that you can concentrate on your on time first. The coils resistance and the voltage will be your most influential factors in what is ideal timing. To tune put the neon on your charge side with no battery connected and make a sketch that only fires once every 30 seconds or 60, point being that you can see ONLY one firing. Set your on time to VERY short to start. Now did the neon light up? If not increase the on time slightly and try again. Go through these motions until you get a mild glow on the neon from one firing. You don't want a super bright one because when you add the frequency it is going to be stronger than it is with only one pulse. You just want to see an indication across the neon that your loading the coil well.

Now connect a charge battery and remove the neon. This previous part is only for finding the ON time and will fry your circuit if you go to the next step without putting a charge battery on.

Once you discover a good on time proceed to increase the frequency by decreasing the off time. Does this method make sense to you? Find the ON time for your coil, then increase the frequency at which you fire that ideal on time. This will get you in the ball park with any coil, then you can make small adjustments.

Now for a bonus try the same on different coils, longer, shorter, different gauge, try lower voltage, higher voltage, you get my point. I know you are meticulous enough to run these tests and start to understand the factors involved. You want to be able to pick up any coil and make it sing for you my friend and you can once you understand. This same knowledge applies to the mechanical setups as well but with MC's we can really push the circuits.

[Brian McNece]

Hey Brian,
Sorry buddy I did not notice you made this new post.

Now that you are gaining more experiance it might be worth the effort to go back and look at some of what I said back when you had all the trouble with the first SSR that didn't work right. What I am getting at is for you to understand proper coil loading, not that your doing anything wrong and perhaps you do already understand but I had given you specific instruction on tuning for a coil with the MC. IN short I will repeat here a little.

You do not want to over saturate your coil ( or under saturate). Get yourself a neon if you don't have one so that you can tune. Set your off time for a very long period so that you can concentrate on your on time first. The coils resistance and the voltage will be your most influential factors in what is ideal timing. To tune put the neon on your charge side with no battery connected and make a sketch that only fires once every 30 seconds or 60, point being that you can see ONLY one firing. Set your on time to VERY short to start. Now did the neon light up? If not increase the on time slightly and try again. Go through these motions until you get a mild glow on the neon from one firing. You don't want a super bright one because when you add the frequency it is going to be stronger than it is with only one pulse. You just want to see an indication across the neon that your loading the coil well.

Now connect a charge battery and remove the neon. This is only for finding the ON time and will fry your circuit if you go to the next step without putting a charge battery on.

Once you discover a good on time proceed to increase the frequency by decreasing the off time. Does this method make sense to you? Find the ON time for your coil, then increase the frequency at which you fire that ideal on time. This will get you in the ball park with any coil, then you can make small adjustments.

Bob
Yes, that does make sense, i do remember you saying that when i first started, and i had done it with that high resistance coil and the ssr that wouldn't cooperate. I have not gone back and gone through the process with my good coil, but i sure am going to. I probably am over saturating the coil, sometimes it wants to warm up for me, then i am not comfortable leaving it charge unattended. Again thank you for your help. Looking forward to more videos from you. I think my big battery that i mentioned in the previous post is desulphating, it will climb in voltage and then it will drop a little, hold there for a while and then climb again and it's been repeating that for a couple days now. It's up to 13.66. It had been as high as 14.11. I had bought it as new old stock, the guy sold it to me at a steep discount because it had sat in the store for almost a year. It looks promising.

[BobZilla]

Yes it sound to me like your cleaning it too. Is it a wet cell or a sealed?

When they start to behave like that I find it is best to get a small'ish load like an auto bulb and drain off for an hour or two and then charge some more.

[Brian McNece]

Yes it sound to me like your cleaning it too. Is it a wet cell or a sealed?

When they start to behave like that I find it is best to get a small'ish load like an auto bulb and drain off for an hour or two and then charge some more.

Bob
It is a wet cell. I'll try the small load idea.

[Brian McNece]

Yes it sound to me like your cleaning it too. Is it a wet cell or a sealed?

When they start to behave like that I find it is best to get a small'ish load like an auto bulb and drain off for an hour or two and then charge some more.

Bob
I had a little time this evening (plus i really wanted to try this) so i stopped the charging and after a short rest i hooked a 12v fan up to it and drained some of the charge off of it. I let it rest again and it came back up to 12.79. Then i did what you had said about finding the right on time, i was surprised to see the neon glow orange at just a mere 50 microseconds I bumped it to 100 and it was a little brighter but not much. I then removed the neon and hooked the battery up, then started adjusting the frequency, it took a few steps to get it to where it was pulling just under an amp, right around 800 ma. It charges nicely and since I wanted to let it go overnight I didn't want to get to aggressive with it until I can be there to see what is happening. Temperature of the coil was maybe 1 or 2 deg. Above room temp.
I watched it like that for about an hour and the temperature didn't climb plus it charged from 12.79 to 13.87, had a few of the pullbacks along the way, had a real nice chart going and was about to take a picture when it did that "usb connection lost" thing and i lost my chart too.
The frequency is right around 165 hz.
I want to spend more time with it, probably won't be able to till the weekend.
Question for you, will the output of the charger need to be adjusted when i use the solid state charger in conjunction with the cap pulser?
This is very interesting stuff, i still like the wheeled versions but this solid state just adds a whole new level of possibilities to it.

[Brian McNece]

I had about an hour or so this evening so I made another adjustment to the charging sketch, which resulted in an increase in the frequency to 228.9. Amp draw was right on 1 amp. The picture below is of that hour give or take, you can see on the chart the voltage dips and rises, i think this is the sulphation cleaning process. Time will tell. Next time I get, i will probably drain some of the charge off and restart the process again

[BobZilla]

Question for you, will the output of the charger need to be adjusted when i use the solid state charger in conjunction with the cap pulser?

Hi Brian,
Thats is up too you really. It will depend on how you set your dumper's on/off AND the size of capacity your using. There are many approaches to cap dumping and you have seen some of mine. You can go for real fast with only a few volts over the target or slower with double the volts of the target etc..

I would suggest a traditional timing to start out with and then play around from there if you like. Set your dumper's time so that your cap builds up to about 28v and then dumps. Your question was about changing the rate of the driver but you see everything in the system plays on each other so it just depends where you want to adjust. Say your driver is running where you feel it is just perfect, so don't change it's timing, change the dumper with either a longer off time or a shorter one which will raise or lower the cap voltage. A ball park setting when doing a double the target voltage approach is setting things so that you are dumping between 2 per second up to about 1 per 2 seconds. Any longer of an off and it usually will not keep things going well enough for an effective charge but that also depends on the battery.

[Brian McNece]

Hi Brian,
Thats is up too you really. It will depend on how you set your dumper's on/off AND the size of capacity your using. There are many approaches to cap dumping and you have seen some of mine. You can go for real fast with only a few volts over the target or slower with double the volts of the target etc..

I would suggest a traditional timing to start out with and then play around from there if you like. Set your dumper's time so that your cap builds up to about 28v and then dumps. Your question was about changing the rate of the driver but you see everything in the system plays on each other so it just depends where you want to adjust. Say your driver is running where you feel it is just perfect, so don't change it's timing, change the dumper with either a longer off time or a shorter one which will raise or lower the cap voltage. A ball park setting when doing a double the target voltage approach is setting things so that you are dumping between 2 per second up to about 1 per 2 seconds. Any longer of an off and it usually will not keep things going well enough for an effective charge but that also depends on the battery.

Thank you Bob