Thanks for the responses!
Woody, looks like you have great and mature products, well tried,
tested and supported. But while I enjoy a good excursion once in a
while, I'm really in this to create renewable energy things myself*,
and to explore new ways of doing things to make them more accessable
and practical. It looks like Ray Electric Outboards did this too, to
create outboard designs and make an enterprise out of it, but I have
a few new ideas to try out.
I _hope_ to improve on efficiency with my efficient BLDC axial flux
motor _and_ with the U-joint right angle drive instead of gears. I
can well believe 47% is considered a high efficiency, but it does
appear to leave some room for possible improvement before the law of
diminishing returns asserts itself too strongly. (I may be interested
in one of your props, tho - I bet you've got those well honed for
efficiency!) And if my experimental design is successful everyone
including RayEO is free to incorporate anything they like about it
into their products.
Andrew, I think my motor's torque will be pretty much matched for 1:1
drive and that adjustments will be a matter of selecting prop pitch.
It can't be run too much faster than 2000 RPM regardless of voltage
because at some point (4000-5000?) there's a risk of the .5" x 2" x
1" supermagnets breaking off the 10" steel plate rotor.
Cheers,
Craig
* As an example of how one thing can lead to others... people told me
that Peltier elements were too inefficient for anything more than a
small camping cooler -- not worth thinking about for a fridge. If I'd
taken that advise, nothing would have been achieved. But here's three
things that have arisen from the experiment:
-- I'm the only person I know who has ever made a home made fridge.
It does use 1/2 as much electricity for only 1/3 the cubic space of
my regular fridge in spite of 3" of foam insulation - but it works
and it's 12 volts. And with a freezing/melting ice chest to store and
release coldness, plus when I've done the "smart control", it'll run
mainly in the day when the solar panels are making the electricity.
If I hadn't explored it, the ideas for making it practical and for
reducing battery energy storage requirements to run a fridge wouldn't
have come to light.
-- Peltiers may be inefficient heat pumps, but an electric
heater/heat pump made from peltiers would produce about 40% more heat
per watt of electricity than a straight electric baseboard heater.
That's not earth shattering, but not trivial either. It does need a
hole through the wall for an aluminum heat transfer rod/bar and a
heatsink with a small fan on the outside. (I now have the parts to
make a small experimental one sitting here - 250W yielding 350W of
heat to the room. I'll probably mount it in a window.)
-- Also I'd never have heard of magnetic refrigeration, potentially
at least as efficient as compressors and gas refrigerant. I have some
ideas for making that practical, too. (Current research designs look
pretty impractical to me. Sigh... maybe fall 2013?)
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