Brushless Motor Generator

GoldenMotor.com

ferball

New Member
Apr 8, 2010
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I know this is a little off topic, but my motor bike hobby has led to one thing to another and to another and I know from hanging out on this forum that even as off topic as this is, the knowledge is here to answer the question.

I have a small brushless 12vdc motor (internal cooling fan from a pc) I am messing around with low voltage generation and I know that you can easily just spin a standard DC motor and it will generate some electrical current. However my research and minimal application tells me that a brushless motor may not work because of the control unit.

I can't find anything solid in plain english on this topic so I was hoping for some further enlightenment.

The project started out as a bike dynamo, but I doubt that is where it will end.
 

Kevlarr

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Jul 22, 2009
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It'll produce AC. Check into homebrew wind power sites and you'll see a lot of them use a car alternator fitted with a permanent magnet armature which works well for them because you can run 3 phase AC over a lot further distance with thinner wire and not much loss whereas using a DC generator you have to run welding cable all the way from your generator head to where your batteries are.
 

ferball

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Apr 8, 2010
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My next question is, will the bridge rectifier I bought at radio shack to turn my white wire to dc, is that same piece of hardware I would need to rectify my low voltage dynamo to produce4 a dc current?

And thanks for the info so far.
 

ferball

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Apr 8, 2010
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I recognize the fact that what I am using may not produce much current, but like most of my projects I do it because I want to see if I can. But in regards to the dc being dc I was under the impression that brushless motors are some how special.
 

ferball

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Apr 8, 2010
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Thanks Kev for the post, but my other research seems to indicate that controllers may different on brushless motors and there for work differently. Is this true, or are the controllers pretty standard and they all put out AC current?
 

corgi1

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Aug 13, 2009
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There is a bunch of U-tube tutorials of nice low rpm generators made with stepper motors out of comp. printers 12 volts + output