Battery Charging using Variable speed generator

Thread Starter

Dawsonh4

Joined Apr 11, 2017
75
The Buga-Boo with this project is finding or creating a High-Voltage-Battery-Charger
that will still operate with acceptable stability,
with a substantially varying AC-Input-Frequency and Voltage.
A ~130-Volt Battery-Charger is not a common "off-the-shelf" item.

The Batteries must not be overly discharged for long periods of time,
so the Charger must be able to supply substantially more Charging-Current, on average,
than the "measurement-devices" consume.

Every time that Power is converted from one form to another, there will be inevitable losses.
Sometimes these losses can be simply estimated
when there is plenty of "overkill" designed into the system.
Just how much "overkill" is available, must be determined by measurement and math-formulas,
unless experience indicates that there is a very good chance that there will be "substantial-overkill".
Vague descriptions need not apply.

Every specification, on every piece of interactive equipment, is a factor in a Math-Formula.
No specifications means no Math-Formulas.
No Math-Formulas means no definitive answers, just guesswork and estimations.

People who want to help others here will generally try to provide
guesses and estimations just to get a conversation going.
This is useful because the experience level of a Thread-Starter is usually a big-fat unknown.
It's quite common in these Forums that people think that
they have a "World-beater" Idea that must be kept "secret",
but "secret" ends the conversation, and results in disappointments all around.
This has gotten to the point that it is virtually a running-joke with
the regular contributors here, sometimes almost an expectation.

If anything about your project must be kept "secret", the result will be only "off-hand-guesses".
All specifications, of all related equipment, must be either,
documented,
measured,
or estimated as closely as possible,
to receive any sort of really useful answers, or recommendations.
.
.
.
All due respect - I provided everything you asked for but haven't received much help from you. Nothing is a secret here. Open book if you have any other questions that would lead to a recommendation. There are about 25 different devices pulling power on the site. Instead of providing you with each individual piece of equipment I can confidently say that peak usage is around 200 Watts, but average is more like 80 watts. What I will do, if it could lead to you recommending an off the shelf piece of equipment, is record a week of electricity demand from the battery bank and report back to this topic on Friday with daily average, max, and min.
 

strantor

Joined Oct 3, 2010
6,875
All due respect - I provided everything you asked for but haven't received much help from you. Nothing is a secret here. Open book if you have any other questions that would lead to a recommendation. There are about 25 different devices pulling power on the site. Instead of providing you with each individual piece of equipment I can confidently say that peak usage is around 200 Watts, but average is more like 80 watts. What I will do, if it could lead to you recommending an off the shelf piece of equipment, is record a week of electricity demand from the battery bank and report back to this topic on Friday with daily average, max, and min.
If the load is 80-200W then why are there 9 batteries in the bank? 80 to 200W at 12V is 6.7A to 16.7A. You said "car batteries" and the typical average car battery has about 50 amp-hours of capacity. With 9 batteries you would have 450AH, or enough to supply these loads for 27 to 67 hours. But I would not expect to find literal car batteries used for this application. More likely is deep cycle batteries which look just like car batteries but have capacity around 100AH or 200AH, so 9 of them might have 1800AH or enough capacity to power an 80W load for as long as 11 days. Does that sound right? Does this diesel generator only come on every few days?

And you keep referring to "12V" yet you said the batteries are in series. Which is it? If the batteries are in series then your DC bank is over 100VDC. If your loads are 12V then your bank is NOT in series, it is in parallel.

EDIT:
NOTE I forgot you mentioned a solar panel and the above math completely disregards the attached solar panels you mentioned. That math is for sustaining the loads on battery power alone, no solar. If your load averages 80W then a single battery with a single solar panel should keep this system running in perpetuity. Something is not adding up by a factor of yuge. There should not be a diesel generator in this equation. When you say 80-200W do you actually mean 80-200 amps? 80 watts is about how much juice a back porch flood light uses.
 
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strantor

Joined Oct 3, 2010
6,875
@Dawsonh4 disregard the bold portion below:
If I were you I would start down the path illuminated by @nsaspook . The specs of the specific model he posted seem pretty close but there may be better fits. Your application is essentially the same as a wind power application so I would be looking at wind turbine charge controllers. They ought to handle the rectification, boost/buck, and battery charging algorithms all in a single unit.
I have been looking at wind turbine charge controllers and they have a bunch of crap you don't need or want, designed to keep wind turbines from overspeeding in high wind (the load bank resistor scheme that I was describing in the previous thread). I don't think you have to worry about regulating the speed of this generator. It sounds like it either goes the proper speed for 60Hz or it goes slower, never faster, and no risk of it going so fast it self destructs. Is that correct?
 
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