3Ø for Battery charger

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Little Bill

Little Bill

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Why would a battery charger for forklifts need 3Ø. I have three to hook up, one is single Ø and two are 3Ø. All three are 208V. I was wondering why some would need 3Ø? Would there be anything inside that would require a certain rotation, such as a fan? I wouldn't want to hook up the 3Ø with the wrong rotation if it requires a certain direction.
 
Little Bill said:
Why would a battery charger for forklifts need 3Ø. I have three to hook up, one is single Ø and two are 3Ø. All three are 208V. I was wondering why some would need 3Ø? Would there be anything inside that would require a certain rotation, such as a fan? I wouldn't want to hook up the 3Ø with the wrong rotation if it requires a certain direction.
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I dont recall ever seeing forklift charger that had a fan, or has anything else rotation sensitive.

(even if it had a fan, I cant imagine it would be three phase).
 
A battery charger uses three-phase power for the same reasons anything else does: More power delivered over less copper, less power wasted due to voltage drop, better utilization of supply equipment, and less ripple current without filtering. As already mentioned, they can use single-phase power; you just get better results with three-phase.
 
I don’t like the new chargers, the old ones you could change the voltage by just changing some taps and fuses. The new ones, if they order it wrong, your sol.
 
If you're going to convert AC to DC such as in a battery charger or in the front end of a VFD, a three-phase six pulse rectifier will have significantly less ripple than a full-wave single phase rectifier which produces only two pulses per cycle. This reduces the peak-to-average ration of the DC current and the amount of filtering that may be required.

The minimum instantaneous output voltage of a 3-phase bridge rectifier output (without filtering) is 0.866 times the peak value, which occurs when two of the L-L voltages are equal. In contrast, the minimum instantaneous output voltage of a single phase full-wave rectifier is zero. And if you want even lower output ripple and reduced harmonic levels on the AC input current, with a 3-phase source you can have 12-pulse, 18-pulse, etc. rectifiers by using phase shifting transformer arrangements.
 
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hillbilly1 said:
I don’t like the new chargers, the old ones you could change the voltage by just changing some taps and fuses. The new ones, if they order it wrong, your sol.
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They got some in about a year ago and ask me to connect them. The system voltage is 208V and the chargers were 480V. After I told them it would require transformers to use them, they abandoned them. These they have now are multi voltage up to 480V.
 
Little Bill said:
Why would a battery charger for forklifts need 3Ø. I have three to hook up, one is single Ø and two are 3Ø. All three are 208V. I was wondering why some would need 3Ø? Would there be anything inside that would require a certain rotation, such as a fan? I wouldn't want to hook up the 3Ø with the wrong rotation if it requires a certain direction.
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Bill, how do you type that phase symbol?
 
electrofelon said:
Bill, how do you type that phase symbol?
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Type the number 2205, then hold down the "Alt" key and the "X" key. This works at my kitchen table in a blank email window that I use to create replies for this website (which I then cut and paste in here). But oddly, it does NOT work in the simple editor on the bottom of this page.

There are several symbols that are very similar to this - some are Swedish letters, some are the symbol for Diameter, etc

2205 -> ∅

2300 -> ⌀

Whatever symbol floats your boat, you need to find the Unicode number for it, then you can use the Alt and X thing to enter it. But I would almost always cut and paste it myself, because I'm lazy and dumb!

You can also try holding down the Alt key and typing 0216. That seems to work in this window.
 
Little Bill said:
There is a program called "Character Map". It has all kinds of characters you can use. You choose one, select "copy" then paste it in.
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Well, that's my new thing to have learned today! Thanks Bill. Works in W10, just type in Character Map in the search Window.

And Holy Smokes, there are a ton of symbols there to look thru.

If you head down to (hex) 0x00D8, that's your Ø symbol - and it indicates you can also get it by typing Alt 0216 like I noted above. (0xD8 = 216).

Thanks again.

1620832939333.png
 
GoldDigger said:
The other common indicator of sarcasm is this font (MS Comic Sans).
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Well - that's my second new thing to have learned here today! Never heard that before.

I have a soft spot for MS Comic Sans Serif - I write all my structured text programming in it. For me, it is very "readable", and by that I mean when there are lots of lines that are quite similar, but the variables change slightly from line to line, I find that Comic Sans Serif lets me identify mistakes in the code easier than other fonts. But maybe that's just me.

Might I have been coding sarcastically all these years? Where is my sarcasm detector ;)
 
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