- It smells bad all of a sudden.
Is that you?
- [Dan] Yeah, that was me.
Okay, today's video is proudly sponsored by Raycon.
Raycon has been protecting people
from the dangling stem since 1942.
(Dan laughs)
- Today we are embarking on the quest
to find out how much voltage an alternator can produce
when it is spun up at,
how fast?
- I mean I assume at 60,000 psi,
it'll spin it one rpm per psi.
So 60,000 rpm.
(Dan giggles)
- [Dan] The math checks out.
- Yeah.
- [Dan] And we'll be using this,
a water jet to spin it up to that speed.
Which runs at 60,000 psi.
We have all the pieces.
- Yup, we got it.
- [Dan] And this is our setup.
- [Mitchell] This is my science fair project.
- [Dan] Whoa.
- [Mitchell] The water jets gonna come in
and spin at warp speed.
We've got a voltmeter to see
how much volt juice we're making.
A horn.
So we'll hear the horn first
and then we've got it set up
so later we can hook up the headlights
and see if it can get like really loud or explode.
I don't know what horns do.
(Dan laughs)
Maybe the light bulbs will explode.
We're gonna get to that.
- [Dan So this all is the creation of Anthony.
- Don't blame me for that.
(Dan laughs)
This is terrifying.
- [Dan] But we'll all agree
that this is super janky. (chuckles)
- [Anthony] Yeah, we just, ya know.
This is the doot doot so we got our doot hooked up.
This is our common ground here.
And this is our common power here.
- [Dan] Which connects to the positive post
on the alternator/generator.
- [Anthony] It's a six volt alternator.
- [Dan] And these are 12 volt?
- [Anthony] 12 volt items.
- So, we're hoping that we can spin it up fast enough
to generate more than the six volts it's rated for.
And make it horny in here. - [Dan] Either.
(chuckles)
Should we start it at low pressure first?
- Nope.
- Send it.
- [Dan] Just send it?
In case it just like explodes?
- Just send it.
(Dan laughs)
- [Dan] That'd be silly.
- [Dan] Okay, we're goin in full pressure then.
(machine running)
(violent surge of water splashes)
(water flows violently)
(water sputters as motor speeds up)
- [Dan] Okay, we've made a few changes.
We've placed a board in here to minimize sloshiness.
And we have now plugged in one of the headlights
because it's too loud.
You can't hear the horn if it is working.
We should be able to see some kind of light.
(machine running)
(talking drowned out by machine)
(violent surge of water splashes)
(motor runs rapidly)
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- [Dan] Click on the link in the description
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Okay, so this is gonna be one of those videos
where you're gonna learn something.
'Cause we just learned a lot about alternators.
- [Anthony] Science.
- [Dan] So, none of this was working.
We have a six volt alternator
that does not have an internal regulator
so theoretically it should be able
to generate more voltage than six volts.
But we couldn't get it to go past like .93.
- Yeah, it wouldn't do it.
- All we had hooked up here was our positive post
and then the ground going to our very janky terminals here.
- [Anthony] This one's positive.
This one's negative.
- [Dan] You can tell by the way that they are.
Turns out, alternators don't
have permanent magnets inside of them.
- Which is the difference
between a generator and an alternator.
I guess a generator can do its own thing.
Alternators have to have some kind
of a jumpstart signal to get the magnets going.
- [Dan] That is what this post is right here
that is labeled field.
Which is for field generator, right?
- Yeah, generates a magnetic field
using the battery.
So it's like electromagnets in there that then,
as the coils in the motor spin,
it generates a current through the other wires.
So we didn't have the electric magnet
so it's just spinning freely.
- [Dan] Now, we have some additional wires hooked up here
which are going to a six volt battery on that table.
- It only has about four or five volts in it, but.
- [Dan] That's enough.
- [Anthony] What we're gonna see happens I guess now
is the alternators gonna generate
start generating power and try
to run our horn and our lights.
But it also, we aren't going to be able
to keep the battery on it
so it's gonna still have to generate
its own electric magnetic signal.
- [Dan] 'Cause you don't want to blow the battery.
- Or blow ourselves up.
- [Dan] Yeah.
- [Anthony] So basically
- [Dan] And so, that's what this loop is right here.
That once the alternator's going
and it's starting to create its own electricity,
we disconnect the battery over there.
And this wire here will allow the alternator
to feed itself power to the field post.
- [Anthony] But because all of this stuff operates,
these are all 12 volt items and this is a six volt,
this thing already has to work twice as hard just to spin,
just to get these to operate normally.
So we figure, you know
since it's 60,000 psi water jet pressure,
we're gonna spin this thing up pretty heavy.
So we're hopin the water jet can keep this spinning
through the load that it's gonna be generating
and also spin it fast enough to get everything to work.
- Come into it.
(machine running)
Here we go.
(water spurts violently)
(motor spins rapidly)
(water flutters)
- [Dan] So in that clip,
it might be too hard to tell in the video,
but the noise that this was making when it was running
was a lot lower which means I think
it was running under a lot more load
and like half speed it was
when we weren't producing any voltage.
- [Anthony] And it was operating
everything really well, and.
- [Dan] I mean we kept it like nine volts, I think.
- [Anthony] Yeah, we were - [Dan] Is what it was.
- [Anthony] The important thing to think about though
is the alternator was powering itself
so it was generating enough power
to run its own magnetic field and keep working,
running the horn.
- [Dan] Because we disconnected the battery
after the first like,
as soon as we saw light start coming out of there
we disconnected the battery.
- [Anthony] Yeah.
- [Dan] So it was self sustaining at that point.
- [Anthony] So, yeah, 'cause we don't wanna
cause damage to a battery or anything like that.
So, you can see that we were runnin in the video,
probably like a constant eight or nine volts.
Which is pretty, pretty incredible
that that was spinning that fast.
And that's why you hear it making such a hard noise
is because this is working so hard
that it's just brrr, like loaded down.
- [Dan] Do you remember form the first time we ran this
before we had the field post hooked up.
We were generating like .9 volts.
So we have our jumper wire in
so that the alternator can feed its own field generator.
Is that .9 volts enough to get to kickstart the alternator
without having the battery hooked up?
(machine running)
(water splashes violently)
(motor spins rapidly)
- Except we've talked about (drowned out by Dan)
- [Dan] Oh my goodness!
- What happened?
- [Dan] The glass just exploded on that.
- Uh oh.
I'm not gonna say--
- [Dan] It's just full of glass in there. (laughs)
This one it just popped the filament.
- [Anthony] We slowed down the video footage
of what happened here.
And essentially what happened was,
is once this kicked off,
the multimeter couldn't even keep up
with the amount of voltage that it put out.
It kinda--
- [Dan] It maxed out.
- [Anthony] It like ghosted itself for a split second
and right when that was happening these exploded.
- [Dan] So we've got the alternator turned up now
to the next highest setting
so that we can read a higher voltage, and.
- [Anthony] We're out of headlights.
- [Dan] We're out of headlight but let's just see
what kind of voltage that shows.
(machine running)
(water jet shoots)
(motor runs rapidly)
So,
initially, it just spiked straight up
to looked like just over 20 volts.
Which is why the meter was maxing out on the other setting.
Which blows the headlights and then the alternator
it kind of the pitch of it changes after that point.
And it sounds like it's under its own load really.
- Yeah. - Under insane load.
- It bogs itself down and that's
where the multimeter kind of balances
around 13, 14,
12 volts.
- 13, 14, 12.
- [Dan] Yeah, 13, 14, 12 'cause that's how people count.
So for those crunching the numbers on their pad of paper,
we take 480 volts
at 75 amps
and we converted it
to 20 volts peak DC.
Does the math check out?
- I think we did it.
We nailed it.
(Dan laughs)
(upbeat jazzy music)