TOPIC:

loudhvx wrote: Thanks for confirming the sense line operation and the diode patch.
That's pretty impressive just a few hours later to have real-world results.

Gee thanks my friend (s) . Rather than arguing with speculation, I should thank you. I am between projects right now. You know what they say about idle minds.

The diode is a little bit of insurance if the relay fails (not very likely). I couldn't believe how crazy the output voltages got within a few seconds after pulling the fuse with no sense voltage at all.

After all I already had the parts and my Weller soldering station is always sitting within reach.. It did take some digging however to find those diodes.

I do miss having a Radio Shack around. Sounds like you've spent some time there too.

I edited my earlier post with some other projects if you want to burn the dust off the old soldering iron.

loudhvx wrote: Just to confirm your wiring:
Pin 86 is ground.
Pin 85 is switched 12v (originally brown wire).
Pin 30 is connected to the battery with a 10 amp fuse.
Pin 87 is to the brown wire of the regulator.


The diode is to 85 and 87I do miss having a Radio Shack around. Sounds like you've spent some time there too.

I edited my earlier post with some other projects if you want to burn the dust off the old soldering iron.

That is exactly how it is hooked up. I didn't want to cut the connector off of my wiring harness so I made up a short jumper to hook the brown wire to my relay. The plug pin is still attached to the harness under the blue shrink.

I had the diodes already from a 30 amp 5 volt power supply I repaired for a CNC pipe bender at large cart and shelving manufacturer here. I worked industrial maint. for a automated equipment dealer sales and service co. for years.. I also was a flight simulator tech many moons ago. I loved the machines, the hours sucked. (3rd shift)

CNC pipe bender running Win XP:


A PC with XP and I/O interface cards. If you step on the mats, the machine stops.. Complicated machine, that will hurt you if you are stupid. Most machines will. The supervisor is checking it out to see if it's working. ::


At one time radio Shack had some neat stuff and lots of parts and kits. Towards the end, they were nothing much more than a high pressure cell phone pusher. I cringed at the thought of arguing with yet ANOTHER idiot trying to sell me a phone, yet he couldn't tell a diode from a hair dryer. Then when they filed bankruptcy, they sold off everyone's data that they mined.. Kinda like Zuckerburg selling your info.

For electronics repair parts in STL it's Gateway Electronics. I've known Them, and particularly Doug for many years ~20 i guess. When I was going to college getting my EE degree, I went to Gateway to buy components for the little assignment projects the instructors would require. They actually know what a diode is, and stock semiconductors and so much electronics junk it would make your head spin. It's kinda a mess, but Doug can point you towards whatever, or usually point you right to it. (as organized as electronics components can get) There are times I have to tell him not to quit his day job, but he takes it well. lol

www.gatewaycatalog.com/

I seem to remember that the brown voltage sense wire will only ramp up voltage if connected.
People who would boil batteries on old looms would disconnect it.

weeZee wrote: I seem to remember that the brown voltage sense wire will only ramp up voltage if connected.
People who would boil batteries on old looms would disconnect it.

The regulator uses the brown sense wire to sense system voltage. When the voltage goes up, the regulator reduces output to the battery, and vice versa. Disconnecting it causes the regulator to stop doing anything and full power is output to the battery. Obviously that will boil the battery.

weeZee wrote: I seem to remember that the brown voltage sense wire will only ramp up voltage if connected.
People who would boil batteries on old looms would disconnect it.

This is an obvious typo. I think he meant that the output would ramp up if the brown wire were > disconnected<. Proofreading is a good thing.

The R/R "thinks" the battery voltage is -0- volts if the sense voltage is zero, when the brown wire is disconnected , so it tries to compensate by going to maximum output mode.

Boiling the battery would be the least of your worries, it will also put the stator into melt down mode, and let the smoke out of the wiring harness.

Well, let's not forget, the stator has more current through it when the regulator is shunting...in order to regulate voltage.

loudhvx wrote: Well, let's not forget, the stator has more current through it when the regulator is shunting...in order to regulate voltage.

I'm not quite sure the regulator shunts the entire unused voltage / current through the stator as some seem to think . The stator / wiring would burn up during normal operation if this were the case, since it would never see a drop in current.

I smelled my wiring getting warm after stator replacement. That led to troubleshooting and finding my brown wire running lower than B+ voltages. This was the culprit, since I could jumper it to B+ and make the output voltage drop.

With the relay in circuit, the yellow stator wiring is no longer heating, and B+ is at steady nominal voltage levels.

This sounds like a case for more investigation with a wide-band AC amp meter in line with the yellow wires. Any volunteers? ::

During shunt events, the SCR is directly shorting the stator wire to ground. But SCR's have a significant voltage drop on them, which is why they get so hot. So the voltage on the stator wire drops from about 15v to just a few volts. That allows the stator current to increase since its load has now dropped, but remember, it doesn't spike to a high current immediately because a stator is an inductor, and the current through an inductor cannot change instantaneously (like in a resistor). So the stator has a self-protecting feature against shunt events.

I studied the process when I was designing a Kz voltage regulator that actually worked like the stock one.
The stator signals are viewable here:
s3.amazonaws.com/gpzweb/GPZAltntrWaves/AlternatorWaveforms.html

Here is a detailed analysis of a shunting regulator design. It is not a fully-mature design as it turned out to cost much more than what you would pay on ebay for a relatively new, but used factory regulator. Normally, I would start the process of reducing parts counts and combing multiple parts into one part. That's where all the time gets spent, making the circuit efficient. It's easy to just throw gobs of parts at a circuit to make it work. The beauty in a design (and where all the work comes in) is when you can pare it down to the bare essentials while maintaining performance.
s3.amazonaws.com/gpzweb/RegRec/GPZvRegMagnetField.html

I used to have a girlfriend that would over complicate EVERYTHING, then do nothing because it was too much work. LOL

I just took my Fluke AC meter and checked the AC current on one of the yellow wires at the plug and the B+ voltage simultaneously. It does appear that the stator current remains somewhat stable no matter what the sense voltage is. All readings were at about 4K RPM. It's kinda tricky holding a camera and the throttle while my meter is vibrating off onto the floor, at a steady RPM both at the same time.

Battery voltage and current before starting the motor.


I unhooked the wire to the regulator from the relay completely so that it went from normal charging with a fully charged battery, to WFO charging.


This was normal charging values with B+ sense voltage to R/R at about 4K RPM.


13.78VDC was at idle with very low current on stator (aprox 3-4 amps). So in summary, the stator current remains ~ the same no matter what the output voltage is, but varies greatly with RPM (frequency). This doesn't explain why I found my yellow wires heating up with the overcharging I experienced, but since this all happened about 2 years ago memory may be a limiting factor too.

I need to go re-wrap my wiring harness now.

I believe that is basically what I said would happen? That is, it would have more current when shunting, but not a whole lot more due to the self-protecting inductance. By the way, if the meter is not a true RMS meter, it is only estimating the AC current (and voltage), and since we are not dealing with sine waves (when a stator is hooked up to a load and/or regulator), the estimation will be significantly off.

The voltage readings on the scope show the shunting is the SCR actually shorting the stator wire. The few volts seen on the scope are the result of the forward drop on a triggered SCR.

Each shunt event is only a brief moment of shorting of one single stator wire for some portion of a single pulse. The shunt may happen at the beginning of the pulse, or the shunt event can be triggered after some part of the pulse has occurred normally. The scope makes it all pretty clear.

I realize my fluke meter isn't a true RMS meter. I'm not designing a circuit, so accuracy does not matter.

I also looked at your waveforms, You spent a lot of time on that data. Thanks for sharing. I'm curious how you got those waveforms with no probes hooked to the front of the scope? I haven't used my scope in years, but I'm pretty sure it still works.



I wanted to see for myself how the charging system regulates voltage and if the stator current increased or decreased with higher sense voltage producing lower regulator output. And then I did a little "sharing " myself.

BTW I had to design & build a 1 amp DC power supply in order to graduate. I don't remember the specs I was given. I still have and use this from time to time. I like using the LM317 variable voltage regulator chip in the TO -220 package. I have used them on several applications / projects.