I have an electric wheel designed for an electric bicycle conversion. By my understanding, the wheel is essentially a 48V, 1000w rated brushless DC motor. It comes with a thumb throttle and kill switch built into a break lever.
I am looking to set it up as part of a stationary rig to do some testing and want to run the wheel on AC power. The wheel has no regenerative breaking so only draws power from a battery (not included in the kit).
Instead of wiring the positive and negative terminals of the motor to a battery, can I wire them to the appropriate terminals of an AC-DC transformer adapter such as this one and plug this directly into mains?
If not, what extra components do I need to include?
Best Answer
You can wire the + and - connections of the included controller to a power supply. Bear in mind that the current, which will be limited by the controller can initially be quite a lot higher than the rated current. A battery will tolerate that, but the switch mode supply you ink to may well limit or shut down when it sees that current, so you often need a large margin on rating the power supply.
Given that the battery's characteristics - it has a finite internal resistance, and the supply will droop under load - will affect the performance of the motor, so if you're using the rig to evaluate available power, you're better either using the intended battery, or a supply that has matching characteristics.