Make Your Own High Power Dynamo

This article is about making your own high voltage and high amperage dynamo. 

You could see the electromagnets on either sides. The box is made of cardboard and the wires running down are from the commutator for the load to be connected and the axle is of the armature of the motor which is to be rotated to make the high power dynamo.

The two neodymium magnets which are visible in this photo are for field flashing Their opposite poles are to be attached to the screws for allowing a small amount of current to pass so that it could be multiplied. Without this field flashing especially this dynamo will not work. If you want more current form the dynamo you need to have more efficient brushes or to put the field as the rotor and the conductors as the stator.

This is made by me and it is very easy to make with the things easily available at your home or your nearest electronics store. This is a very simple guide and I was able to make the whole dynamo with the things available at home. This dynamo is different from your earlier permanent magnet generators as it produces a large amount of current and the amount of current can be varied by increasing or decreasing the strength of the field magnets.

Things you will need:

1. A 12 volt or 1.5 volt motor.
   
2. Cardboard 
   
3. Tape
4. 36 AWG magnet wire
   
5. Iron Core or a simple Screw will do
   
   
   
   

Actually you will be needing a motor's armature which looks like this

You will have to make a box out of cardboard. You could print and cut out this image to make your box and then just fold it at the inner boundary to make your box. Leave the lid open to put the commutator and the armature in.

But remember that each square should be according to the size of your commutator which looks like this

I have used this type of armature. It is of 12 volt motor. This works best because it has a large number of windings and produces much voltage.

You have to wind around 500 turns of wire on the iron core and it should be in clockwise direction on one while anti clockwise in the other this will give you north and south poles on different cores (or screws). You will be keeping the two cores on opposite directions and the armature will be in the middle balancing over the commutator and supported by the lid of the cardboard. Then what you are going to have is a motor but instead of permanent magnets you will be using iron screws ore iron core with the windings. This will be acting as the electromagnet and the energy will be supplied by the generator (motor acting as generator) and when it is producing the required amount of voltage you will attach the load and control the power supplied to the field coils (electromagnet). A fraction of power will be supplied to the field coils.

The advantage of this type of self exited dynamo is that we can adjust the amount of voltage as well as the current produce by varying the voltage supplied to the field coils. Don't think that you can produce any number of voltage and produce free voltage but if you are having a source with high torque and sufficient speed you could produce considerably high power and it allows you to gain any amount of power and utilize the full potential of your source. 

If you have a high speed source then using gear train ratio you could reduce the torque according to your need and produce high power which would have been lost when using your permanent magnet counterparts.