What would you do with a 77 KW induction heater rig?

It may be good for heat treating oilfield equipment parts.

Yea but that could turn into a real job and a real job tends to severely cut into a guys play time.

Been tempting to look into it though but if I was going to do that I would set it up as a portable system. On site work always pays well.

• Heat treat rails for Ronseto's rail road
• Run up an awesome electric bill

"Run up an awesome electric bill"

I have a wife. She does that for me already.

On a more serious note the power source for it would be a bit of dilemma. I presently only have a 240 VAC 200 amp 1 ph service capacity in my shop and my big welder, plasma cutter, and 15 HP air compressor all running at once can, although rarely, push it past its limits if I don't pay attention.

Granted I can easily modify the primary power circuits on the induction heaters unit to work on a 240 VAC 1 Ph source and I do in fact have the necessary rectifiers and capacitor banks to do so but still that would at best only get me to just over 2/3 peak power.

Given that it could be a good excuse to get my utility service stepped up to a 400 or 500 amp service though! My local utility guys know me just well enough that I could likely request it and be taken seriously.

Hmmm.

In the electric motor and transformer industry the process of anealing laminations is currently done with large ovens, huge exo-gas generators and dryers to affix the carbon monoxide to the mateal.

The equipment takes many thousands of square feet, operates at very high temperatures, and the boiler is a timebomb...

With an induction heater you would simplify the process and reduce the number of variables, reduce the space, make it safer, (still need to inject gas to the heat chamber though).

Study a bit about it, you'll find it interseting at least.

If you have a lathe, hot metal spinning could be fun. Kind of like shaping steel the way a potter shapes clay on a wheel.

Here is another example...this one isn't heated, but it is being done by hand. Heating would allow you to use less expensive material.

Stick it on eBay?

How can you pass up a "toy" like this. And converting the input front end power to single phase will "keep you off the streets". I've wanted to own one of these for a while for heat treating, as well melting. You should be able to run it at partial power, I wish I knew more about them. Don't they run around 200KHz, with most of the design being a resonant power amplifier.

You lucky dog. Hope the scrap yard give this to you.

If I remember the specs it has an adjustable output so yes I would just run it at partial power.

If I am understanding the numbers from the Model number it's 50 KW output at 30 KHz with a 77 KVA input not 77 KW output. My mistake.

Lepel LEP12-50/30

Well, being that you are looking for a toy, you COULD make a steam cannon to assault public beaches with. That might be fun. You could hotroll nanogold sheeting. I'd imagine you'd want to find a nice, flat crystal for a table. You could recycle computers and such. Point is, if you are looking at this as a fun project rather than as a job; then you can do artisan projects or the like, in which case you might want to look at things outside the normal box of competitive business oriented products traditionally prepared on one of these machines. You really kind of suck. Mostly because you probably don't live in my neighborhood.

I used to use one in conjunction with a High vac system and quartz bell jars to super heat and out-gas parts for vacuum tubes. My "bombers" were only 22Kw each. This thing must be a friggin monster! The coax feeds for mine were 4" OD aluminum clamshell over 1/2" copper pipe suspended by Teflon rings. My inner load cans were made of extruded molly tubing and I got temps of as high as 1600C, enough to vaporize copper in a high vacuum.

You are going to need a lot more than just a bigger line feed to use this thing. Keeping the coils and coil forms from over heating during use means lots of cold running water AND impedance matching the transmitter to the load and the driver coil.

The tubes used in a big bomber like that are expensive! Think a couple grand each.

I sure hope you can do it because if you can, you have a very useful tool that can do some very interesting things. H2 atmosphere brazing comes to mind as well as out-gassing, melting, heat treating (very controllable and precise) etc. etc. But 77KW? That's a monster that could heat treat a V8 block!

This one is not that old. Its all solid state IGBT based.

It also come with it's own self contained cooling system for the induction coils and tank circuit components as well.

Make horseshoes

Forge and heat treat custom knives.

Brand cattle?

I think I'd use it as an instant water heater for hot water and space heating. You could experiment with different shapes and materials within the induction field for efficiency and flow rates. Vary the power to flow rate and see if high power high rate is better than low power low flow for efficiency. Of course many of you could probably come up with calculations to prove some of this on paper first, but it still might prove to be interesting. Perhaps some kind of fluid other than water would prove better. Or dissolved iron or other metals within the fluid to really soak up the energy , then transfer it to a secondary medium for distribution. Could prove to be a viable alternative to simple heating elements in some instances and applications.

I currently face the dilemma of having a large quantity of stranded copper wire that I would not only like to strip, but wonder if I could successfully melt back into larger chunks. The scrap yard here only gives second choice to stranded of this gauge; large chunks and I could get first choice prices!

I suspect you will find the scrapyard's rates have something to do with the economics of turning fine stranded wire into block.

Instant hot dog machine!!

Instant hot dog (army catering) machine .... and on the basis of the $1000 screwdriver, this induction heater is worth a small fortune! Don't sell it on eBay .... send DARPA an email as soon as possible!!

One thing I have been wondering about is if these units can be set up with a remote coil assy for doing 'in place' type induction heating opposed to always having to bring the parts to the machine?

What I would like to do if I pick this thing up this summer is make a set of portable coils (lower powered of course) that can be up to 20 feet away from the power source.

Yes you can. But you need a big water cooled coax to do it. This is a problem if you need the link between the bomber and the coil and load to be flexible. The ones I worked with were about 10 feet away from the bomber and the coax was routed overhead for a total length of about 20ft. The juice was coupled in to the plumbing with regular stranded cables at the bomber, and with copper braid around flexible hose at the coil. The water for cooling was introduced to the coax inner pipe by flexble rubber hoses and the coolant was distilled water or di-water, low conductance in either case.

The coax was very important because any impedance mismatch resulted in very high losses, and with 20+KW things got hot FAST. Most of the tuning was in matching the load and coil at one end and then adjusting the grid current on the driver tube at the other.

Good luck, and be very careful with that thing. I got the shock of my life from one just getting too close to a mismatched coil. Knocked me back like a hit from a shotgun!