by Tony » Sat Nov 22, 2008 6:00 pm
John has nailed it.
Designing a retarder is a bit tricky, because there are a number of conflicting requirements that need to be balanced.
As John says, amps x turns determines magnetic field strength. But all those amps and turns will generate a lot of electrical heating within the winding. The external surface area of the winding determines how well it will cool, and how hot the wire will actually get inside the coil. It is very easy to burn up these dyno coils with too much dc current.
There will always be an even number of windings, whatever will fit around your particular rotors. Four, six or eight windings are fairly common. But it could be any even number. The windings can all be made identical, but the electrical connections should alternate between adjacent windings. So each pole face alternates, north, south, north, south, and so on around the rotor.
The multiple windings can be connected in various series or parallel combinations depending on the required final operating voltage.
A typical Telma retarder has sixteen twelve volt windings. If they are all connected in parallel this will run off a twelve volt vehicle electrical system. If two parallel strings of eight are connected in series, it will then operate from a twenty four volt system quite common in trucks.
Other coil connection combinations are possible, and if all sixteen windings are connected in series, a Telma can be run from a 12 x 16 = 192 volt dc supply if you have that high a voltage.
I have a friend that owns a transformer winding company, and at one stage he was asked by a customer to rewind some dyno retarder coils that had burned out. He gave me all the details of how he stripped the burned out windings and counted the turns, and measured everything up.
The central iron magnetic core was 80mm in diameter and 90mm long (face to face). The coil consisted of 380 turns of 2.0mm diameter copper wire. Outside diameter of this coil 125mm. This is a twelve volt coil, the electrical resistance ends up being around 0.695 ohms, and it draws 17 amps at 12 volts. This is for a fairly large retarder. Sixteen of these coils will hold 900 Ft/Lb of torque at 4,000 rpm (685 Hp)
I don't know if that helps anyone, but it is a starting point for anyone planning to reverse engineer the coils of a fairly large eddy current retarder.
Also known as the infamous "Warpspeed" on some other Forums.