Building a Phase Converter - Part 1

[Music] morning everybody welcome back to the shop this morning is going to be the first of three videos I'm doing on the face convertor build there are a lot of videos on YouTube right now about building phase converters or you know reviews of phase converters that someone has built they were all to me lacking one thing and that was what was the process that was gone through to really determine what were the right capacitors and that's the mystery what are the right capacitors where in the circuit and getting those correct so that you get the most efficient ghost leg or generated leg you possibly can with the least amount of power coming into the system in the video descriptions I put a link to a document and that is what I'm following I would highly encourage you guys to get that document and either downloaded have it open on another screen or print it out if you follow along in the wiring diagram this will probably make more sense in addition what I will be doing will be following the steps that are outlined in the in the document itself as far as how to go through the tuning process this is going to be kind of like a cooking show where everything's a little pre measured but I will take you through the steps of how I laid it out on this board as I went through the initial wiring steps and then I'll go through setting up the capacitors in the different areas and testing them till we reach the optimal readings and we'll zip through that and in the end what we'll have is a working prototype of a phase converter that we will then build upon in the next two videos my pony motor is a seven and a half horse totally enclosed fan cooled motor seven and a half horse is going to be plenty to run the equipment I've got I can even convert my mill if I want the largest motor that I'll be driving will be the 5-horse motor on the lathe enough talking let's get started building this thing okay the first thing I'm going to do is lay out my comings and go this is going to be where my power comes in over here is where I'm going to hook up Pony mother or the idler and over here is going to be my three-phase out for that these I got these snazzy little connectors almost exclusively the connectors that I'm using came from the surplus electronic store I frequent in Fairborn called Midwest electronics Midwest electronics they have a website but a lot of what they have isn't on the site so if you're looking for something from there feel free to call two guys that own the place or real nice guys okay in idle out here I'm gonna lay in these connectors one of these I expect to be just temporary these are just for laying things out that's running this is gonna help me optimize how things layout we're gonna call this down here ground I think I can even draw the symbol ground we've got little Spade connectors already on the ends of some of these again I don't know how many of these are going to get reused when we actually put it in the final enclosure but for now I can see very clearly what's hooked up and what's not the way I'm laying this out is this is single-phase so I have two legs I'm going to connect one leg here via a switch and I'm going to connect another leg the other leg down here which will make this middle one the ghost right here in the middle I'm going to put a switch so let's move to the switch so this is the switch I've decided to use it's just a great big it's actually a three-phase capable switch three on each side and it mounts on dinner rail so this is a din rail mount type of deal that goes into here very handy stuff I used this a lot in my CNC build so we're just gonna screw this here to hold this switch and then I'm gonna connect from my connector block to the switch you got my three line 120 120 making my 240 circuit my ground line is here and then my third leg is here so you see how that kind of lays out the same way okay now the next thing I'm going to do is connect the pony motor block down to here power coming in switched goes out to two legs the pony motors hooked to the two outside and then the middle one here to the Ghostlight next thing we're going to do is these are our three phases we're going to hook them to our output and this is just a convenience thing we can do whatever we needed here we can take measurements here I'm using this because I want to be able to hook the motor up and try it based on this big layout board the next step I've made a little pigtail here that we're going to use my welder outlet for the time being to test this out so this will be plugging this is actually a 50 amp plug but this will be hardwired in the end this is the lead that the pony motor sitting over here so here we got our ground and our three phases now at this stage of the game if we turn the power on and spun the motor or we used a secondary motor it would work and we would generate some power at the phantom leg however this is going to be an auto starting converter in this drawing it shows two starch pastors we're not going to do that we're going to use just one either way you slice it the start capacitor goes between this leg and this leg here's our start capacitor and here's a push-button switch that we're going to use to activate it so what this is doing for us is throwing the electrical field out of balance so the motor starts to turn and this is a momentary switch we hold it the motor starts spinning we let go now at this point we can start this whole deal they will run with no capacitors in here so let's give it a try let's just see what it does and do some testing switches off double check in the wiring I think we're good so we'll plug her in now I want you to listen because this is important when I when I do it this way the motor will have a hard time starting and you think oh I need more start capacitor but as the other legs come into more balance when we add other capacitors that all goes away so when I turn this you're going to hear the motor hum and then I'll hit the start ready [Music] three to 12 so you can see the ghost leg was generating some power but not a lot and the voltages were way out of whack so now we're at this section for tuning the converter and this is where you get into what capacitors to add where we're going to start by adding capacitors here now I know from my reading that it's going to be at least a hundred microfarads so this is a hundred and thirteen we're going to start with it and we're going to learn why there's four why there's four plugs on these before you get all over me I already verified that the capacitors were discharged okay with one capacitor in listen how fast the motor starts now just with one and this is where we notice there's a big jump here and not much of a jump here and that's to be expected and that actually tells us which one of these letters is which so we're going to add some more this time we're going to add a 50 and this is where these multiple plugs take into account I could wire these to here but instead I'm going to wire these to here when wired in parallel like that the micro farad's increases additively so this is 50 so we're now at 163 there won't be much change in how the motor starts not quite enough for clothes for 238 and we need to get to 242 this is a 20 micro farad we're going to add it and start it again okay we reached our goal 242 we're at 243 perfect or perfect so this one's good double check the voltage make sure the caps have drained one more time we're good so that does the one-leg that's done now we have to do the same thing from here to here so let's start again this is our goal now bc should be less than 250 8 volts AC should be greater than 253 we just added 113 and you can see we're coming up sad some more you're gonna add a 50 again we're going to add them in parallel [Music] one more there's our capacitors here our second set of capacitors here and our voltages there now something needs to be said here these currently are equal but that's not always the case depending on the motor you've got the age of the motor and age sometimes has to do with wear as well as efficiency in the way it was made but these are not always the same read the if you read through the example document that I'm following you'll see that in his case these were different by about mm these were different enough set so with this it should run right now we've got good balanced voltages so let's put it under a load [Music] with it idling he's reading last thing we're going to do is this capacitor across here so that's from here to here now I could do that from here to here but again for this open view this capacitor is from here to here and this reduces amperage so we're no longer checking bolts we'll check in amps the first thing we're gonna do is get a baseline so with it running this is a 20 micro farad capacitor [Music] so at this point this is our rough layout we have a simple switch for cutting in and out the start capacitor simple on/off barrel switch here and this is a fully functioning rotary 3 phase converter admittedly missing some safety options in our next video we're going to add a breaker out here we're gonna add a panel indicator light so we know when it's on we're gonna add a contactor switch in place of this with all those things together along with another push-button switch and we'll have a really nice setup that's for part two ok everybody I hope you got something out of this video it's kind of an ugly layout but it's really just a for my own education now that I know I've got a fully functioning well balanced rotary phase converter from here I can start to add some of the safety features which I'm sure some of you who are out there cringing about like well you know where's your breaker and where's this and where's that those items are for the next video as for now I'm gonna run this year a little bit well just because I can see you next time guys thanks for stopping by the shop [Music] [Applause]

Channel: sbirdranch

Views: 182,726

Rating: 4.8783827 out of 5

Keywords: rotary phase converter, build, diy, diy phase converter, phantom leg, phase converter build, phase, converter, 3 phase

Id: u229h7NcMxk

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2017