I've been struggling with how to make an idea extremely safe for a while, and I think the answer was so obvious I don't believe it took this long to think of it. I'm looking for opinions one way or the other.
The long story short is I want to use a capacitor to enable motorcycles to run without a battery, many of you have participated in the discussions. The electrical system is 12v, and a 10,000uF 25V capacitor works perfectly. However if you connect it backwards it fails in a bad way, so I've been nervous about giving them to the general public. But why not use a start/run cap from a small electric motor? They're not polar so there's no way to connect them backwards, and the voltage ratings are very high so over-voltage is not a concern. Plus they come potted so when they do fail it looks like the failure is contained well (see the image below). I've found a similar 10,000uF 250VAC potted capacitor for only a few bucks. Is there any down side from a technical point of view?
I haven't tried this yet, but I 'm going to order one for this purpose and see if it works as expected.
Here's a failed cap, there is some melted plastic bulging out but it looks like the potting basically contained the failure.
The long story short is I want to use a capacitor to enable motorcycles to run without a battery, many of you have participated in the discussions. The electrical system is 12v, and a 10,000uF 25V capacitor works perfectly. However if you connect it backwards it fails in a bad way, so I've been nervous about giving them to the general public. But why not use a start/run cap from a small electric motor? They're not polar so there's no way to connect them backwards, and the voltage ratings are very high so over-voltage is not a concern. Plus they come potted so when they do fail it looks like the failure is contained well (see the image below). I've found a similar 10,000uF 250VAC potted capacitor for only a few bucks. Is there any down side from a technical point of view?
I haven't tried this yet, but I 'm going to order one for this purpose and see if it works as expected.
Here's a failed cap, there is some melted plastic bulging out but it looks like the potting basically contained the failure.