How do I build a 3 volt powered electric car?
For my physics class a project was assigned in which we have to build an electric car powered by a 3 volt DC motor which could only be powered by 3 volts of battery power (in other words 2 AA 1.5V batteries). We just started learning about circuits so I don't have a very good knowledge about this kind of thing but I was wondering if there was any way to increase the power going to the motor without increasing the output of the batteries. I thought about a transistor to increase the voltage but if the motor can only take 3 V would it blow the motor if more volts were added? Or is there some way to increase amps instead of voltage that would assist the power. In case it helps I am planning on using the 3 V DC micro-vibration motor from radioshack.
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Tagged with: aa • amps • batteries • battery power • circuits • Electric Car • physics class • radioshack • transistor • vibration motor • volt dc motor • volts
Filed under: Electric Car Plans
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The 3 volts from directly hooking up the motor is the best you can do with simple circuits, since you can only use 2 AA cells. You cannot easily get 6V from the cells to drive the transistor.
For more complex circuits, you could use a low impedance circuit to drive a power supply producing higher voltage. This is complicated and expensive, and likely to damage the motor.
Keep the car light, and the motor should give plenty of power. Best just to connect the battery directly, use gears to multiply the torque from the motor. When you do this, the speed of the car goes down, of course.
After you get your grade, you can play with voltage multipliers, the simpliest circuits to increase voltage. Google them for more info. Or, just drop in more cells for fun. Don't mess with these until after you build your machine and get your grade.
go with your transistor idea the motor is only rated for 3 volts it will be able to handle at least 6v
but the down side is it will have no power to get moving because amps will go down have you thought about a gear box?
The question is why do you want to increase the power to the motor? Way back in the old days, we built slot cars and one of the fun things was to rewind the motors for more power and speed. But they were running on storage batteries with chargers to keep the batteries charged so we did not have a problem. A motor will be conservatively rated and can be wound with a fewer number of turns. This will increase the current flow since the resistance will be smaller; meaning you will get more power. Do too much and you will burn out the motor. But unless you can find a DC motor like a slot car motor and experiment, you are probably stuck.