"Robert" wrote in message
...
On Feb 17, 9:24 am, "
wrote:


It's not hard to find discussion of caps as voltage
regulators. Here's an example, about a third of the
way down in this thread:

http://www.smokstak.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16338

Seems like a pretty crappy thing to find though on a
$3000 generator.

Thanks for the link. From that thread, I determined that the
keyphrase I needed to google was "alternator feedback
capacitor".... That gave me the link to a paper called
"Field Initiation Design Fundamentals for Pulsed Alternators"
which has an abstract giving a short explanation of how
the capacitor works. This was an IEEE paper.

It is simply a bootstrap giving feedback to the field of
an alternator....... Not a particularly good regulator, but
sufficient for non precise applications. I had never seen
this before, as I had only used electronic regulators to
the field windings of an alternator with a DC field and not pulsed
alternators.... Live and learn.....

Anyway, if the voltage regulation is critical , an
electronic regulator would work far better.

So caps ARE regulators of sorts? Not just tuning/balancing?

I wonder, if/when I put on this AVR doodad, if the caps should be removed,
or left in place.
--
EA