James Sweet wrote:
I'm working on a generator for someone that recently just quit producing
electricity. On the label it touted the fact that it's a brushless
alternator.

There's a way to do this, but it's rather inefficient.

You take your basic old furnace fan motor, which has stator windings,
and a rotor with pseudo-windings (actually just angled strips of copper
or aluminum.)

Now this kind of motor works just fine, used in billions of
applications. You might wonder how it rotates with no permanent magnets
in the rotor and no slip rings. It's done by induction-- the stator
windings induce current in the rotor, which reflects back a magnetic
field. This requires a bit of slip, so these motors are typically
rated at "1725 RPM" instead of 1800.

You can do exactly the opposite-- rotate the motor and have the
generated current feed back a magnetic field. Only glitch, you need a
hefty capacitor across the stator windings to provide the out-of phase
current. And the efficiency isnt too wonderful. And there's no easy
way to adjust the current versus voltage versus hertz.