This Lego Vacuum Generator Sucks!

I got to say I'm delighted with how this compact generator turned out now previously we used compressed air to drive my turbine generator but today I'm on a different more sucky mission that I think will actually outperform that generator significantly if we start with a wheel here this can serve as a tester rotor and then if we take some of these strong neodymium magnets now stick these to the rotor now we have a generator rotor secure it in place man introduce a coil of copper wire near the spinning magnets and then if we attach an LED voila we have a small generator now of course the LED flashes with each passing of the magnet by the coil but we've done this before plenty on this channel so let's get to the interesting part this little turbine dude will allow us to power it by air of course giving it a weed blow Works nicely and this is how my previous air powerered turbine generator worked which was both fun and a little scary at full Pelt but its major drawback was that despite it having three inputs I could only vary the electrical output in three large steps and each step immediately started dropping output as the compressed air ran down so today I'm on a mission to make a generator that holds its voltage steady and is also continuously variable so that I can pick whatever voltage or output I want so meet heti she's Henry the Hoover's big sister and hopefully she doesn't have an appetite for Lego so can we use heti's uh smooth suction to power this generator well bringing he's nozzle to the turbine doesn't really seem to do much the blades get sucked towards the nozzle but they can't travel past it due to the drag of the air vacuum behind the blades so what if we instead use a propeller this little dude is tiny but it's conveniently a similar size to he's nozzle let's see can we build some speed here well it does take a while but eventually we get just enough speed to generate enough to power the LED this works but it feels ridiculously inefficient what if we use a bigger propeller I'm going to speed this up a little and yeah once again it does work but it took about as long as the smaller prop well then can we increase the efficiency a little by directing more of the airflow over the prop blades if I use a couple of these three bladed propellers inside of this wind tunnel of sorts do we get any better performance yeah sort of now of course I'm not directing the air flow particularly well here and I'm sure I could bump the speed up much higher than the mid 400 RPMs but I still suspect both the torque and the overall efficiency would be garbage but I have another interesting idea here these more Lego tunnel segments look like I can fit these small props inside though I can't quite make them airtight but this might still be good enough to create a focused wind tunnel for these tiny props once we secure them in place we can see that it does help in focusing the air flow and as luck would have it these tunnel pieces almost perfectly fit he's nozzle actually I'm quite impressed with this this is probably one of the most compact vacuum turbines I've seen and surely this can be optimized further now let's see what speed we're getting H it looks like we're topping out at about 5200 RPM not bad for such a tiny Contraption now I know this is cheating but I also wondered if making it more airtight with blue tack would help to improve its speed n it looks like not really though but to be fair didn't do a great job so this is a cool idea I think and with this reasonable torque and speed this design likely has some great promise in an ultra compact vacuum turbine but I still suspect a large bladed turbine will perform much better let me try sealing off this turbine from earlier a little better if we can direct the air flow over it I could see it generating quite some speed and torque but as you can see here I've done an absolutely awful job directing the flow of over the blades that's just isn't working using Technic so I guess we're going to have to use some standard Lego Systems bricks and I want to get a good view of the turbine spinning so we'll pop in a double walled window now generally I prefer Technic so I'm not the best brick builder but I reckon we can still arrive at a reasonable design for this thing now we can pop in our four-bladed turbine and I know I could make it more efficient by making the blades go all the way to the walls but I also don't want to get my Lego totally chewed up by the friction so I'm sacrificing a small bit of efficiency in order to make this more reliable as I wanted to run for quite a while a catastrophic failure when you have heavy magnets spinning its speed is just not something I want to be afraid of here and this hole here is where heti will suck from and then on the other side this is where the air Inlet will pull air in forcing the air over the blades of the turbine we can control the amount of air through the inlet using this gate made of red lift arms all right let's give this an early try of course with no vacuum being generated nothing happens but if I move my hand over the roof we get a small bit of vacuum pulling air over the turbine blades and generating some rotation well now we know this works let's give this thing a roof and may as well make it look a little prettier so now we have a smooth turbine and a controllable Inlet let's give this a quick try oh man that's a satisfying sound and what if we have this wheel here to measure the speed interestingly the speed causes the tire to expand slightly here and when we measure even at low speeds we get around 2,000 RPM and fully open we get a top speed of just over 10,000 RPM now we certainly don't need this much speed on our magnets so let's use a gear reduction from this small gear to this large gear this gives us a 1 to5 reduction giving us some really nice torque then we want to fine control the air Inlet so these gears will allow us to do just that and then this worm gear will allow us to lock the position in place which we can now control with this wheel here so how does she perform we'll start by closing the inlet and even with just a tiny opening this turbine immediately Springs into action as we open the inlet this turbine Roars and this isn't even Full Tilt did okay now we know that this works what speed are we getting with just a crack open we're getting just over, 1300 RPM and then fully open we get almost bang on 2,000 RPM and a hell of a lot of [Music] torque next then we need our beefy magnets these guys are strong and instead of a singlephase generator using just just two coils on either side of the magnets I want this to be a three-phase generator using three coils surrounding the magnet at 120° from each other so to do this we'll use these circular beams onto which we can mount our coils with the magnet in the middle these lift arms then will allow us to mount the magnets into the middle over here and then we need to secure things a little more so now we have our generator core the coils then we'll Mount at 120° from the core one on the side here and another on the other side which are positioned perpendicular to the magnet core and one final core on top there we go now we have our three coils which will create a nice smooth three-phase output so let's introduce the engine engine to the generator we'll want to make sure this joint is real secure all right let's test this single coil by giving it a little lick when we open the inlet even at very low speeds this is outputting a pretty significant voltage yep pretty tasty already so let's give it a real load these high powered should do and even at extremely slow speeds these guys happily flash with the AC being produced as the magnet passes the coil by the way if you'd like to see more of these experiments with Lego and Technology please feel free to like or subscribe cheers so how about we try something a little beefier this here is a 12vt 10 W bulb and for this we'll likely need to get a higher speed on the generator and here we go we're starting to get a little glow and if we Crank It Up we get a nice high voltage to bring it up to a reasonable brightness I just love the sound this thing makes man so far the turbine is holding up really [Music] well so what about three of these guys can we produce enough current to run these yep no problem at all we can get all three of these bright as hell with only a single coil and what voltage are we getting here if I smooth the output with some capacitors and rectify the signal from AC to DC now we can read the voltage with this little LED voltmeter as you can see we can stabilize the voltage wherever we want by just simply turning the wheel I just find this so satisfying having this degree of control and we're topping out at about 8 volts here with a single coil now I'm not pushing this to the fullest open position and he is only being used on our low setting here as I just really don't need more power than this right now okay so a single coil is clearly good but let's wire up the remaining two to our three phase full Bridge rectifier now I'm interested to see what this can do with a 20 W LED array you can see that even without capacitor smoothing the output because we have these three phases the output is actually already very smooth now now this isn't quite full brightness for this chip but it sure is pretty damn bright when I turned this off I could still see some bright spots in my vision for a while and what voltages are we getting now well even at low speeds we're comfortably getting 11 volts and we can push this quite a bit higher damn I love that sound and still no failures now the question is can we actually do something useful with this generator like maybe power my phone now I'm going to go carefully here as I'm not regulating the voltage with a buck boost converter and I don't want to supply more than I can handle now I don't advise anyone do this at home unless you're actually willing to damage your phone and voila my phone is charging I do suspect this would take quite a while to charge though and what about this 20 W ring light when I turn it on we can immediately hear some drag on the generator core and when I bump up the output the ring gets brighter and brighter now this actually produces quite a bit of light definitely enough to light a room reasonably well and of course when I close the inlet the light dies now what about something else practical like powering a radio of course vacuums are loud so there's no point in running the radio with the vacuum so we'll need to store some power in this 5.5 farad capacitor so that we can use it later now it might look small but it actually stores over 1,600 times more than this beefy capacitor here so let's hook up this radio module and we'll use this speaker I made out of Lego to listen to the radio module but first we'll need to store a bunch of energy in our BP capacitor okay this took about 60 seconds to bring us up to three bolts and then just under another miniature so to bring us up to 5 Vols not bad for such a beefy cap then finally we can turn on our radio and even with the radio running and the voltmeter drawing a small current this radio plays for a good 4 minutes or so before the voltage drops below usable level of course our USB powered bonsai tree runs really nicely on this generator I just love the colors on this thing and using the same capacitor we can run it for quite a while after turning off the generator now while making and planning these Contraptions they're usually fun or interesting tests and behind the scenes insights that I'd love to share with some folks that are interested in this kind of thing so if you'd like to support my experiments and these videos I've started a patreon which I'll link just below and eventually I'd also like to offer better instructions and tutorials on how to make these things for yourselves so if you'd like to join please follow me on patreon at Jamies brick jams thanks and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Jamie's Brick Jams

Views: 183,260

Keywords: Lego vacuum engine, lego generator, lego vacuum generator, Lego vacuum turbine

Id: L5h9HZtRTkE

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024