The "FLEET" ("Forever Lead-out Existing Energy Transformer") device is a self-powered electrical generator
which has no moving parts and which can be constructed cheaply. It has
been developed by a Hong Kong based team of people: Mr Lawrence Tseung,
Dr. Raymond Ting, Miss Forever Yuen, Mr Miller Tong and Mr Chung Yi
Ching. It is the result of some years of thought, research and testing
and it has now reached an advanced stage of testing and demonstration
and is nearly ready for commercial production.
Mt Tseung has applied his "Lead-out" theory to the category of low-power circuits known as the "Joule Thief" circuits. These circuits originated with an article by Mr Z. Kaparnik, in the "Ingenuity Unlimited" section of the November 1999 edition of the "Everyday Practical Electronics" magazine.
The initial circuit allowed the very last energy to be drawn from any ordinary dry-cell battery, and used to light a white Light-Emitting Diode ("LED") for use as a small torch. It allows a battery which is considered to be fully discharged, to drive the circuit until the battery voltage drops right down to 0.35 volts. The initial circuit uses a bi-filar coil wound on a ferrite ring or "toroid". Bi-filar means that the coil is wound with two separate strands of wire side by side, so that each adjacent turn is part of the other coil. A coil of that type has unusual magnetic properties. The Joule Thief circuit is like this:
It is important to notice how the coil is wound and how it is connected. It is called a "toroid" because it is wound on a ring. The ring is made of ferrite because that material can operate at high frequencies and the circuit switches On and Off about 50,000 times per second ("50 kHz"). Notice that while the wires are wound side by side, the start of the red wire is connected to the end of the green wire. It is that connection which makes it a "bi-filar" coil instead of just a two-strand coil.
This "Joule Thief" circuit was then adapted by Bill Sherman and used to charge a second battery as well as lighting the Light-Emitting Diode. This was achieved by adding just one more component - a diode. The diode used was a 1N4005 type because that was to hand at the time, but Bill suggests that the circuit would work better with a very fast-acting Schottky-type diode, perhaps a 1N5819G type.
The circuit produced by Bill is:
When driven by a 1.5 single cell battery, this circuit produces about 50 volts with no load and can supply 9.3 milliamps of current when the output is short-circuited. This means that you could charge a 6-volt battery using a 1.5 volt battery.
“Gadgetmall” of the www.overunity.com Joule Thief forum has taken the circuit further and found a very interesting situation. He has modified the circuit and used a “batt-cap” which is a very high capacity, very low-loss capacitor. This is his circuit:
He has added an additional winding to his one-inch (25 mm) diameter ferrite toroid, and he uses that to power a 1 watt LED. Why he has done this is not immediately clear to me, except possibly, that it shows when the circuit is operating. He runs the circuit driven by a small rechargeable battery, which feeds 13 milliamps into the circuit, for a period of fourteen hours. At the end of that time, the batt-cap has gathered enough energy to fully recharge the driving battery in a minute or two, and then power a heater winding of nichrome wire (as used in mains-powered radiant heaters) for four and a half minutes. Alternatively, that amount of extra power could boil a kettle of water. The really interesting thing about this is that the driving battery gets recharged every time and so the circuit is self-sustaining although it is not a powerful circuit.
‘LidMotor’ states that Jeanna also produced a Joule Thief circuit which
could light a 15-watt straight fluorescent tube for about five hours
when being driven by a single AA battery. He states that he was not
satisfied with that level of lighting and here he shows a version (which
he thinks is Jeanna’s design and which Jeanna thinks is his design)
driving a 10-watt Compact Fluorescent Light which has had the ballast
circuitry removed. The build uses an expensive 3.25 inch (83 mm) outer
diameter ferrite toroid, and the lighting from a single AA battery looks
like this:
The ferrite ring is wound like this:
The main winding is 300 turns of AWG #30 enamelled copper wire with a diameter of 0.255 mm. Please notice the gap between the ends of that winding. That gap is important as high voltage is developed between the two ends of the winding and if the winding were continued all the way round the toroid, then the insulating enamel coating the wire would be liable to burn out due to the very high voltage difference between the first and last turns, causing a short-circuit. The two other windings are with AWG #24 enamelled copper wire which has a diameter of 0.511 mm and those two windings are positioned closely side by side in the middle of the gap between the ends of the 300-turn winding. The circuit is like this:
The optional 25 ohm wire-wound variable resistor wastes power but creates a voltage drop across it, reducing the voltage reaching the circuit and so, dimming the light progressively, all the way down to zero. The base resistor “R” has been set at 22 ohms by ‘Lidmotor’ who says that it really should be 100 ohms but he has lowered it to get brighter lighting. Please note which side of the 3-turn and 13-turn windings are connected in the circuit as the direction of winds is very important for those two windings.
It is not uncommon for people to comment on the faint whistling sound make by a Joule Thief circuit (especially a low-voltage version like this). It is my experience that the sound is caused by the transistor resonating with the frequency of oscillation of the circuit, the TIP3055 being particularly prone to this. I suggest therefore, that bolting on a heat sink (which is most definitely not needed to dissipate heat produced by this circuit) will alter the resonant frequency of the transistor/heat sink combination and so stop the whistling.
However, Mr Tseung has taken the Joule Thief circuit and modified it to become a circuit with a very serious output, moving it into a completely different category.
As a first step towards what the team calls their "Fleet" device, the toroid has been enlarged to a much greater diameter. The coil is now wound on a section of plastic pipe, 170 mm (6.5 inches) in diameter and 45 mm (1.75 inch) deep:
The second winding is made in the same way but the connections are slightly different. As before, the end of the first wire is connected to the start of the second wire, but that connection is then insulated and not used in the following circuitry. This just connects the two windings one after the other, known technically as being connected "in series" and is the equivalent of making the winding with just a single strand of wire. The completed coil may look like this:
This particular design is still in it's early stages and so many different coils sizes and constructions are being tested:
The arrangement is for the inner winding of the toroid to be oscillated by the Joule Thief circuit already described. This causes a pulsating magnetic field to envelope the outer winding of the toroid, producing an electrical output which is capable of doing useful work. The really important thing about this arrangement, is the fact that the amount of power coming out of the circuit is very much greater than the amount of power needed to make the circuit operate. The additional power is led out of the local environment and drawn into the circuit, becoming available to do useful work.
The overall circuit then looks like this:
While the outer winding is shown here with thicker wire of a different colour, this is only to make the arrangement easier to understand. In reality, the outer winding is with exactly the same wire as the inner winding, and it will normally go all the way around the toroid. The total amount of wire needed to make the windings is about 70 metres and so it is normal to buy a full 100 metre reel of the twin-core wire, which allows both windings to be made and leaves spare wire for other things.
and the voltage pulses in this output are occurring about 290,000 times per second.
What has worked better for me is using a bridge of four diodes rather than a single diode:
I have used this circuit, driven by a 1.5 volt battery, to charge 12-volt batteries, but the best results are in the five to six volt range. I have used this circuit to confirm COP>1 by charging one small 12V lead-acid battery with and identical battery, swapping the batteries over and repeating the process several times. The result was that both batteries gained genuine, usable power. I suspect that the effect would have been much greater if I had charged two or more batteries in parallel. The toroid was an 8-inch diameter, 10 mm by 12 mm off cut from a plastic pipe which happened to be to hand and the wire used was plastic covered 6-amp equipment wire, again, because it was to hand at the time. Winding the toroid and setting up the circuit was done in a single evening.
Overall, this is a very simple, cheap and easily constructed COP>10 device which has the potential of providing large amounts of free, useable, electrical power. With further development, it may well be possible to produce a version which could deliver the power needed by a whole household. It is also likely that these devices will become available for purchase a quite a low cost. All in all, this is a very important device and full credit must go to the development team who have carried the research to this point and who are continuing to refine the design to produce more and more power.
There are various circuits which I have shown which use the well-known “Joule Thief” circuit as part of the design. These devices have worked well for me. However, in 2014, Sucahyo stated that some people found that pulse-charging batteries for a few times, caused those batteries to then have “surface charge” where the battery voltage rose without there being a corresponding genuine charge inside the battery. That is something which I have never experienced myself but that might be because I didn’t discharge and recharge batteries a sufficient number of times for me to experience the effect. Sucahyo uses this circuit:
which looks rather complicated with two of the transistors connected upside down and protection diodes connected between transistor collector and base. Sucahyo says that he has used this circuit for four years now without experiencing any surface charge effects.
My preferred form of Joule thief uses a bi-filar coil of 0.335 mm diameter wire wound on a paper cylinder formed around a pencil and only 100 mm (4 inches) long, as that produces a very cheap and lightweight circuit (bifilar, >133 turns, single side-by-side layer). As I understand it, the Joule Thief produces a rapid stream of high voltage spikes of very short duration. Those spikes cause the local environment to feed static energy into both the circuit and the circuit’s load device (typically an LED or a battery).
While I have never experienced surface charge from a Joule Thief circuit, I tested some old Digimax 2850 mAHr test batteries which had been sitting unused for more than a year. These did indeed show a surface charge effect when load tested. The first test used one battery to drive the circuit and charged three batteries in series using this circuit:
But no matter how long the circuit operated, it would not charge the output battery above 4.0 volts which is 1.33 volts per battery. The load test results were terrible with the voltages at one hourly intervals being 3.93V, 3.89V, 3.84V, 3.82V and 3.79V after only five hours of powering the load. That is ridiculous performance as those batteries managed 22 hours of load powering with the solar panel design.
Perhaps the batteries were damaged. So I overcharged them with a main operated charger, reaching 4.26 volts which is 1.42 volts per battery and the hourly load testing results were 4.21, 4.18, 4.16, 4.15, 4.13, 4.12, 4.10, 4.08, 4.07, 4.07, 4.06, 4.05, 4.03, 4.03, 4.02, 4.01, 4.00 (after 17 hours), 3.99, 3.99, 3.98, 3.97, 3.97, 3.96, 3.96, 3.95 after 25 hours and 3.90 after 33 hours. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with the batteries so the effect must be a factor of the charging.
Feeding static electricity into a capacitor converts it into normal “hot” electricity, but we want a very simple circuit, so the next step was to add in a 100 volt 1 microfarad capacitor which looks like this:
Making the circuit:
With the battery on charge removed, the voltage on the capacitor reaches
22 volts. Charging the same batteries with this circuit reached 4.14
volts and produced load results of 4.09, 4.05, 4.01, 3.98, 3.96, 3.93,
3.90, 3.88, 3.85, 3.83, 3.81 and 3.79 volts after 12 hours which is much
better than the 5-hour total previously experienced. However,
obviously, something better is needed.
The next step is to use a diode bridge of 1N4148 diodes instead of the single diode, giving this circuit:
Without the charging battery connected, this circuit gives 28 volts on the capacitor and the battery charging is good, giving load testing results of 4.18, 4.16, 4.15, 4.13, 4.11, 4.10, 4.08, 4.08, 4.06, 4.05, 4.04, 4.03, 4.02, 4.00, 3.99, 3.98, 3.97, 3.96, 3.95, 3.95, 3.94, 3.94, 3.93, 3.93, and 3.93 volts after powering the load for 24 hours. This seems to be a very satisfactory result for such a minor alteration.
If two 1.2V batteries are used to drive the circuit, without a battery on charge, then the voltage on the capacitor reaches 67 volts, but that is not necessary for charging a 12-volt battery. Although the change is slight, the circuit operation is changed considerably. The capacitor does not discharge instantly and so, for some of the time between the sharp Joule Thief pulses, the capacitor supplies extra charging current to the battery on charge. This does not mean that the battery being charged is charged much faster and you can expect that full charging will take several hours. I have not yet tested it, but I would expect that by using two or more of these circuits simultaneously, should increase the rate of charge;
There is no need to restrict the battery on charge to a nominal 3.6 volts in any of these circuits as a single 1.2 volt drive battery can easily charge a 4.8 volt battery or larger. The value of the capacitor has a considerable effect and I suggest a one microfarad capacitor is a good choice. It has been argued that the two additional diodes on each side of the battery being charged are not necessary, although I have shown them to isolate the two circuits from each other.
Mt Tseung has applied his "Lead-out" theory to the category of low-power circuits known as the "Joule Thief" circuits. These circuits originated with an article by Mr Z. Kaparnik, in the "Ingenuity Unlimited" section of the November 1999 edition of the "Everyday Practical Electronics" magazine.
The initial circuit allowed the very last energy to be drawn from any ordinary dry-cell battery, and used to light a white Light-Emitting Diode ("LED") for use as a small torch. It allows a battery which is considered to be fully discharged, to drive the circuit until the battery voltage drops right down to 0.35 volts. The initial circuit uses a bi-filar coil wound on a ferrite ring or "toroid". Bi-filar means that the coil is wound with two separate strands of wire side by side, so that each adjacent turn is part of the other coil. A coil of that type has unusual magnetic properties. The Joule Thief circuit is like this:
It is important to notice how the coil is wound and how it is connected. It is called a "toroid" because it is wound on a ring. The ring is made of ferrite because that material can operate at high frequencies and the circuit switches On and Off about 50,000 times per second ("50 kHz"). Notice that while the wires are wound side by side, the start of the red wire is connected to the end of the green wire. It is that connection which makes it a "bi-filar" coil instead of just a two-strand coil.
This "Joule Thief" circuit was then adapted by Bill Sherman and used to charge a second battery as well as lighting the Light-Emitting Diode. This was achieved by adding just one more component - a diode. The diode used was a 1N4005 type because that was to hand at the time, but Bill suggests that the circuit would work better with a very fast-acting Schottky-type diode, perhaps a 1N5819G type.
The circuit produced by Bill is:
When driven by a 1.5 single cell battery, this circuit produces about 50 volts with no load and can supply 9.3 milliamps of current when the output is short-circuited. This means that you could charge a 6-volt battery using a 1.5 volt battery.
“Gadgetmall” of the www.overunity.com Joule Thief forum has taken the circuit further and found a very interesting situation. He has modified the circuit and used a “batt-cap” which is a very high capacity, very low-loss capacitor. This is his circuit:
He has added an additional winding to his one-inch (25 mm) diameter ferrite toroid, and he uses that to power a 1 watt LED. Why he has done this is not immediately clear to me, except possibly, that it shows when the circuit is operating. He runs the circuit driven by a small rechargeable battery, which feeds 13 milliamps into the circuit, for a period of fourteen hours. At the end of that time, the batt-cap has gathered enough energy to fully recharge the driving battery in a minute or two, and then power a heater winding of nichrome wire (as used in mains-powered radiant heaters) for four and a half minutes. Alternatively, that amount of extra power could boil a kettle of water. The really interesting thing about this is that the driving battery gets recharged every time and so the circuit is self-sustaining although it is not a powerful circuit.
Her main point is that using the collector of the transistor as the
power take-off point of the circuit, is inefficient as that draws a lot
of input current without a corresponding increase in output current. She
adds a 74-turn secondary winding on top of her two 11-turn Joule Thief
bi-filar windings, and that appears to give a far better power output.
She uses the very small AAA size 1.2V battery and further drops the
output (because “the light is too blinding”) by putting a resistor in
series with the battery and using many LEDs in series. She has recorded
the following results:
- With no resistor, the output voltage is 58V peaks at 62.5 kHz (open circuit output, with no load at all)
- With a 10 ohm resistor, the output voltage is 49V peaks at 68 kHz.
- With a 33 ohm resistor, the output voltage is 25V at 125 kHz.
The main winding is 300 turns of AWG #30 enamelled copper wire with a diameter of 0.255 mm. Please notice the gap between the ends of that winding. That gap is important as high voltage is developed between the two ends of the winding and if the winding were continued all the way round the toroid, then the insulating enamel coating the wire would be liable to burn out due to the very high voltage difference between the first and last turns, causing a short-circuit. The two other windings are with AWG #24 enamelled copper wire which has a diameter of 0.511 mm and those two windings are positioned closely side by side in the middle of the gap between the ends of the 300-turn winding. The circuit is like this:
The optional 25 ohm wire-wound variable resistor wastes power but creates a voltage drop across it, reducing the voltage reaching the circuit and so, dimming the light progressively, all the way down to zero. The base resistor “R” has been set at 22 ohms by ‘Lidmotor’ who says that it really should be 100 ohms but he has lowered it to get brighter lighting. Please note which side of the 3-turn and 13-turn windings are connected in the circuit as the direction of winds is very important for those two windings.
It is not uncommon for people to comment on the faint whistling sound make by a Joule Thief circuit (especially a low-voltage version like this). It is my experience that the sound is caused by the transistor resonating with the frequency of oscillation of the circuit, the TIP3055 being particularly prone to this. I suggest therefore, that bolting on a heat sink (which is most definitely not needed to dissipate heat produced by this circuit) will alter the resonant frequency of the transistor/heat sink combination and so stop the whistling.
However, Mr Tseung has taken the Joule Thief circuit and modified it to become a circuit with a very serious output, moving it into a completely different category.
As a first step towards what the team calls their "Fleet" device, the toroid has been enlarged to a much greater diameter. The coil is now wound on a section of plastic pipe, 170 mm (6.5 inches) in diameter and 45 mm (1.75 inch) deep:
This section of pipe is "bi-filar" wound with two wires side by side as
already described for the Joule Thief construction. As before, the start
of one wire is connected to the end of the other wire. Then, the
winding is given a layer of electrical tape to hold it in place and to
provide an easy working surface for a second winding.
The wire used for the winding is the widely available red and black pair
of wires, sometimes called "figure of eight" because the cut end of the
wires looks like the numeral 8. The wire should be able to carry 2.5
amps. It must be side-by-side wire and not one of the twisted varieties.
It looks like this:
The second winding is made in the same way but the connections are slightly different. As before, the end of the first wire is connected to the start of the second wire, but that connection is then insulated and not used in the following circuitry. This just connects the two windings one after the other, known technically as being connected "in series" and is the equivalent of making the winding with just a single strand of wire. The completed coil may look like this:
This particular design is still in it's early stages and so many different coils sizes and constructions are being tested:
The arrangement is for the inner winding of the toroid to be oscillated by the Joule Thief circuit already described. This causes a pulsating magnetic field to envelope the outer winding of the toroid, producing an electrical output which is capable of doing useful work. The really important thing about this arrangement, is the fact that the amount of power coming out of the circuit is very much greater than the amount of power needed to make the circuit operate. The additional power is led out of the local environment and drawn into the circuit, becoming available to do useful work.
While the outer winding is shown here with thicker wire of a different colour, this is only to make the arrangement easier to understand. In reality, the outer winding is with exactly the same wire as the inner winding, and it will normally go all the way around the toroid. The total amount of wire needed to make the windings is about 70 metres and so it is normal to buy a full 100 metre reel of the twin-core wire, which allows both windings to be made and leaves spare wire for other things.
For those of you who are very technically minded, the output waveform looks like this:
and the voltage pulses in this output are occurring about 290,000 times per second.
What has worked better for me is using a bridge of four diodes rather than a single diode:
I have used this circuit, driven by a 1.5 volt battery, to charge 12-volt batteries, but the best results are in the five to six volt range. I have used this circuit to confirm COP>1 by charging one small 12V lead-acid battery with and identical battery, swapping the batteries over and repeating the process several times. The result was that both batteries gained genuine, usable power. I suspect that the effect would have been much greater if I had charged two or more batteries in parallel. The toroid was an 8-inch diameter, 10 mm by 12 mm off cut from a plastic pipe which happened to be to hand and the wire used was plastic covered 6-amp equipment wire, again, because it was to hand at the time. Winding the toroid and setting up the circuit was done in a single evening.
Overall, this is a very simple, cheap and easily constructed COP>10 device which has the potential of providing large amounts of free, useable, electrical power. With further development, it may well be possible to produce a version which could deliver the power needed by a whole household. It is also likely that these devices will become available for purchase a quite a low cost. All in all, this is a very important device and full credit must go to the development team who have carried the research to this point and who are continuing to refine the design to produce more and more power.
There are various circuits which I have shown which use the well-known “Joule Thief” circuit as part of the design. These devices have worked well for me. However, in 2014, Sucahyo stated that some people found that pulse-charging batteries for a few times, caused those batteries to then have “surface charge” where the battery voltage rose without there being a corresponding genuine charge inside the battery. That is something which I have never experienced myself but that might be because I didn’t discharge and recharge batteries a sufficient number of times for me to experience the effect. Sucahyo uses this circuit:
which looks rather complicated with two of the transistors connected upside down and protection diodes connected between transistor collector and base. Sucahyo says that he has used this circuit for four years now without experiencing any surface charge effects.
My preferred form of Joule thief uses a bi-filar coil of 0.335 mm diameter wire wound on a paper cylinder formed around a pencil and only 100 mm (4 inches) long, as that produces a very cheap and lightweight circuit (bifilar, >133 turns, single side-by-side layer). As I understand it, the Joule Thief produces a rapid stream of high voltage spikes of very short duration. Those spikes cause the local environment to feed static energy into both the circuit and the circuit’s load device (typically an LED or a battery).
While I have never experienced surface charge from a Joule Thief circuit, I tested some old Digimax 2850 mAHr test batteries which had been sitting unused for more than a year. These did indeed show a surface charge effect when load tested. The first test used one battery to drive the circuit and charged three batteries in series using this circuit:
But no matter how long the circuit operated, it would not charge the output battery above 4.0 volts which is 1.33 volts per battery. The load test results were terrible with the voltages at one hourly intervals being 3.93V, 3.89V, 3.84V, 3.82V and 3.79V after only five hours of powering the load. That is ridiculous performance as those batteries managed 22 hours of load powering with the solar panel design.
Perhaps the batteries were damaged. So I overcharged them with a main operated charger, reaching 4.26 volts which is 1.42 volts per battery and the hourly load testing results were 4.21, 4.18, 4.16, 4.15, 4.13, 4.12, 4.10, 4.08, 4.07, 4.07, 4.06, 4.05, 4.03, 4.03, 4.02, 4.01, 4.00 (after 17 hours), 3.99, 3.99, 3.98, 3.97, 3.97, 3.96, 3.96, 3.95 after 25 hours and 3.90 after 33 hours. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with the batteries so the effect must be a factor of the charging.
Feeding static electricity into a capacitor converts it into normal “hot” electricity, but we want a very simple circuit, so the next step was to add in a 100 volt 1 microfarad capacitor which looks like this:
Making the circuit:
The next step is to use a diode bridge of 1N4148 diodes instead of the single diode, giving this circuit:
Without the charging battery connected, this circuit gives 28 volts on the capacitor and the battery charging is good, giving load testing results of 4.18, 4.16, 4.15, 4.13, 4.11, 4.10, 4.08, 4.08, 4.06, 4.05, 4.04, 4.03, 4.02, 4.00, 3.99, 3.98, 3.97, 3.96, 3.95, 3.95, 3.94, 3.94, 3.93, 3.93, and 3.93 volts after powering the load for 24 hours. This seems to be a very satisfactory result for such a minor alteration.
If two 1.2V batteries are used to drive the circuit, without a battery on charge, then the voltage on the capacitor reaches 67 volts, but that is not necessary for charging a 12-volt battery. Although the change is slight, the circuit operation is changed considerably. The capacitor does not discharge instantly and so, for some of the time between the sharp Joule Thief pulses, the capacitor supplies extra charging current to the battery on charge. This does not mean that the battery being charged is charged much faster and you can expect that full charging will take several hours. I have not yet tested it, but I would expect that by using two or more of these circuits simultaneously, should increase the rate of charge;
There is no need to restrict the battery on charge to a nominal 3.6 volts in any of these circuits as a single 1.2 volt drive battery can easily charge a 4.8 volt battery or larger. The value of the capacitor has a considerable effect and I suggest a one microfarad capacitor is a good choice. It has been argued that the two additional diodes on each side of the battery being charged are not necessary, although I have shown them to isolate the two circuits from each other.