In alt.engineering.electrical Jeff Jonas wrote: |>|> Or maybe we just need DC distributed in the home. But don't get any idea |>|> that Edison was right ... he was selling pulsing DC. | |>| That's interesting. What do you mean by "pulsing DC" --- unregulated? The |>| Smithsonian historical material indicates that the steam-powered generators |>| were speed regulated and the load was just incandescent lamps initially, of |>| course. | |>Edison's generators output DC by reversing the electrical connections every |>half cycle. The end result is basically the same as a full wave rectifier |>bridge. You get 2 pulses per cycle. I don't know what speed his generators |>actually ran at. | | Edison's generators were rather clever: they had a bus bar equilizer | so each shared the load equally (varied the field coil?). | If the generators were intentionally out of phase, | that would smooth out the combined output.
2 or 3 alternators on the same rotor shaft, aligned at different angles, could do that phase shift, I suppose.Interesting concept ... 3 phase DC. I've seen circuits for AC to DC power supplies that were designed to use 3 phase AC power to get smoother DC by means of 3 full-wave bridges. I never worked out what kind of current each of the 3 AC phase lines would have. The one I first saw was wired delta.