I am doing a DIY three phase AC motor power generation project. I can understand the basics of electronics, and also understand how the wires are wired in a single phase rectifier. However, for three phase, I am unable to understand from any of the videos or documentation on how to do the wiring.
I am planning to buy something like this rectifier.
I get from the circuit diagram that the DC positive output is on the bottom left of the product image and the bottom right is the negative. I also get that the three live wires need to be connected on the other side.
My confusion is how the neutral of stator gets connected to the bridge rectifier, or is this not necessary? My stator looks like this image.
In the Stator the coil winding goes clockwise starting from the pin marked '110C1' and all three phase coils end at the small dark rectangle to the the right of the pin. Earlier, I just tested power generation by connecting my multimeter to one of the live phase pins and the neutral to the single joining of all phases.
Is there no neutral required, since when one phase is live, the others are not?
Best Answer
The answer depends somewhat on what you intend with the AC and DC voltages afterwards, but one option is to ignore the Neutral line if you only want the DC output:
It would appear you have a 'Y' wired stator, so (if all you want is the DC output) you can safely ignore the Neutral.
All three phases are active all the time in a conventional generator. In your variant (which looks to be based on a washing machine motor) it depends on the configuration of the rotor magnets and stator coils.
I assume you are have already read things like this.
Additional: I'm not sure what you may have done with your motor windings, there are many projects where they are re-configured to get different voltage/current options. The table below shows the options tried at this Uni for different applications. In many cases the voltage output for the (usually with series connected pole windings) motor is too high at gas engine speeds so they get wired in parallel to reduce the voltage and increase the current capability.
I'd be tempted (and this is just my opinion) to wire the motor (series pole windings) as a Delta output configuration which will reduce the voltage ( this would reduce the voltage by (Y-phase-to-phase / 1.7) ) and increase the current capability (reduced phase to phase winding resistance) when gas engine driven.
And since the pole windings are stationary you could always bring them out individually and connect them into various configurations to test out your available voltage/current options at engine speed.