{"id":5459,"date":"2012-12-23T16:40:08","date_gmt":"2012-12-24T00:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/?p=5459"},"modified":"2013-01-25T05:45:16","modified_gmt":"2013-01-25T13:45:16","slug":"2012-12-23-watsons-massively-parallel-capacitor-array","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/?p=5459","title":{"rendered":"2012-12-23 Watson’s Massively Parallel Capacitor Array"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I finished gluing the 10 000 uF capacitors down to a piece of wood.\u00a0 I now have a Massively Parallel Capacitor Array (MPCA)\u00a0 Now the hard part comes: connecting all 150 of them up in parallel.<\/p>\n

I bought a whole box of 250 electrolytic capacitors on tape and fan folded.\u00a0 They were only ten dollars US from Goldmine-Elec.com.\u00a0 I sure wasn’t going to be able to use all of them up in various projects in my lifetime, so I had to have something to use most of them up.\u00a0 I got a piece of 3\/8 inch plywood 4 inches wide by 24 inches long, and marked some rows out in pencil so I knew where the caps were to be placed.\u00a0 Most of the day and a tube of silicone seal later, I had them in place and ready to dry overnight – see the photo.<\/p>\n

Now the hard part comes: connecting them together with some heavier gauge wire.\u00a0 I think bare wire would be easier to work with.\u00a0 I’m still wondering about overcurrent protection.\u00a0 Should I put a fuse on each long row, or will a single fuse for the whole array be sufficient?\u00a0 How much current should the fuse handle?\u00a0 This array adds up to a lot of capacitance, a total of 1.5 farads.\u00a0 And at ten volts, that could be a lot of current if it was shorted.\u00a0 I don’t plan on charging it quickly; maybe over the day with a solar cell.\u00a0 Then get it to light LEDs at night.\u00a0 But I got to figure out how I want the array energy to be converted and used.\u00a0 Should I just use analog parts, like regulator chips?\u00a0 Or should I treat it like a variable voltage source, and let a buck-boost DC-DC converter change the array’s output to a fixed voltage?<\/p>\n

Lots of questions that I need to investigate and answer.\u00a0 I have a bunch of Maxwell 2600 Farad, 2.5 volt ultracapacitors, and those have so much energy that I can treat them like a voltage source and just connect a Joule Thief to them and run the LEDs from that.\u00a0 I also bought some DC-DC converters on eBay, each is capable of taking in unregulated voltages and putting out a steady voltage.\u00a0 They’re very efficient and barely get warm.\u00a0 I may be able to use one of these on the MPCA to stabilize its output.<\/p>\n

I started out with a box of 250 caps, on fan folded tape.\u00a0 Now, after using up 150 on the MPCA, I still have nearly 100 caps left.\u00a0 If I had a smaller piece of wood, I could wire up more of them – maybe 50 more – in another array.\u00a0 Then I could bring the total to 2 Farads.\u00a0 Maybe I’ll get to that later.<\/p>\n

Update – The weekend before New Years Eve – I took apart some multiconductor foil shielded cable and salvaged the bare stranded wire from it.\u00a0 I think it was about 22 AWG, and I used it all up – about ten feet – to wire up the MPCA.\u00a0 I still wasn’t finished so I had to strip off some other wire to get more bare stranded wire to finish.\u00a0 Now that all the hard work is done and I have all of them wired up, all I have to do is mount a terminal strip on the MPCA board and wire them all to the terminal strip.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 I can’t believe it’s nearly done.\u00a0 When I started, I thought it was going to be a daunting task.\u00a0 It took time and patience, but nothing that posed a technological challenge.<\/p>\n

Back to working on the MPCA…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finished gluing the 10 000 uF capacitors down to a piece of wood.\u00a0 I now have a Massively Parallel Capacitor Array (MPCA)\u00a0 Now the hard part comes: connecting all 150 of them up in parallel. I bought a whole box of 250 electrolytic capacitors on tape and fan folded.\u00a0 They were only ten dollars <\/p>\n

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