Battery Power

[cabbage]

OK, since I too have often been accused of coming from Mars... Let me aid you with a few thoughts "Water Brother". Your loco is going to have to continually detect the voltage state of your on board battery pack (BP) and then reference this with the supply voltage (SV) from your track. How do you intend to do this while the battery is discharging through the motor and simultaniously being charged from the rails -unless your system fast switches between two sets of on board BPs(?) Remember you are dealing with a chemical reaction that takes a finate amount of time to occur. The train will also need a bridge rectifier to enable it to supply the BP with voltage of the correct polarity regardless of the direction or position of the train. The wheels will require insulating from the track and the chassis and the current pickup shoe to the SV will need to make good contact with the rail. The BP will only charge up at around 10% of the discharge rate -unless they are specifically designed to do so (mine are, they are computer UPS batteries). If you are going to use your track to charge your batteries in the locos with them -your best bet might be to use mid frequency AC at about 1Khz. Most simple KT88 AB1 ultralinear amplifier circuits work fine at this level... Always remember K.I.S.S. regards ralph

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the feed back.  I can see that it's kind of like having a bunch of batteries for battery powered tools.... put in a freshly charged one and stick the discharged one on the charger.  Will think on this a while and try to grock the difference between my idea vs the simplicity you describe.

[cabbage]

All of my electric locos use Sealed Lead Acid (SLA) gel cells of 6Volts 4.5Amp Hour rating. The charger for this is a plug in unit and it takes 90 minutes to completely recharge one of them. The SLA must be in the upright position to do this. I think that your idea for a charging section of rail is impractical. This is not because of the technical aspects, it would be very easy to do, but rather the needless duplication of the equipment required. You would have to have one regulator and charger sensor per locomotive, then rig external power feeds and circuit breakers. What I do is a simply lift the lid, drop one in and then play for about 3 hours per SLA battery pack -total changeover time around 10 seconds. While I am doing this another one is charging -or trickle charging in its slot in my shed. I have a total of 10 of these batteries at a grand cost of £25. All of my track is electrically "dead". Why make life more complex? regards ralph

[two tone]

 

May I surjest that you read some railway mags on recharging of batts. All I have seen say recharge 2-3 hours via a proper chager in a charging bay  think how are rechargeable razer works.   Hope this helps

[Anonymous]

I'm currently gathering ideas whether or not will be able to do anything with them anytime soon.  My interest in the "hybrid" is not necessarily to be able to run either way but to have track power for recharging batteries.  How about a "refueling" station that is a hot track section?  The wiring, devices, and circuit logic on board the locomotive would direct the power for charging the onboard batteries.

Also if large stretches (or all) of track were hot might the power continually recharge batteries, but the drive power would always be from the battery?