For HackCWRU, myself (Tyler Laseter) and Jonny Hall built a 5kW+ induction heater from scratch over the course of approximately 20 hours (Friday 10pm to 3am, Saturday 2pm to 4am). Friday consisted of assembling the water cooling system and initial testing; Saturday we really got it going well and spent the rest of our time pulling everything together onto a nice piece of plywood and making it safe and practical to use (with many, many fasteners from Thinkbox!).
An induction heater is a flameless, highly efficient, well-controlled device that can make iron red hot and aluminum into silvery blobs. I have wanted to build one for several months, and HackCWRU was a convenient impetus.
The heater has a very simple schematic (which I will sketch on the chalkboard) however many of the components are somewhat expensive and/or rare (and were primarily obtained surplus in the past, and been sitting idly by in a bit of a stockpile fo rthe right project to come along.)
A significant amount of effort had to be expended to match the heater to being run in Millis for the demo without tripping the circuit breaker. Special alarms and overrides had to be designed and implemented to prevent our demo from being cut short -- albeit at significantly cut power (~1700 watts) as there is not enough power in Millis to feed Trogdor!
We built it for the purposes of elarning more about such things, forging railroad spikes into various objects, and just because.
See the image gallery for images (I just uploaded one in the regular form, as it's 7AM and I have little interest in making ZIPs).
Built With
- chutzpah
- copper-tubing
- maxwell's-equations
- solder
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