[twombo]

I live off the grid and availablity of power to run my shop is tightly constrained. I do have a Cummins/Onan 9 kw diesel generator set.... three phase. It's a 12 wire unit and I could wire it single phase in a "zig zag" connection, but then I have only 6 kw to play with. Seems a waste of perfecly good juice!!!

I am thinking of converting all my CNC operation to three phase. dust collector.... easy. Spindle... easy. CNC controller.... now that's a horse of a different flavor!

I currently have a single 1.4 kw toroidal based P/S in my controller. Each axis runs a gecko 340 and an Ametek 600 in. oz servo at 36 volts.

What about three smaller... say 500 watt single phase p/s units ... one for each axis?

I'll run the PC and display on the PV based house power system.

Thoughts, suggestions? Simpler approach?

Thanks

Mike

[Al_The_Man]

Why not just use the three phase for the motors and spindle, run the 1 phase from your service supply, you could always provide a contactor or relay circuit interlock, this could be wired to detect that both are present, or some similar arrangement.
Al.

[Geof]

I am out of my depth here but your situation has a small similarity to a crazy idea I had years ago; bear with me.

Your 36 volts is DC and whatever controls the motors just draws on the DC supply? This is where you need nearly 1500 watts of power for driving things.

The 'whatever' includes a PC and three colorful lizards which need 120volt AC, but this is control and does not need much power; less than 500 watts maybe?

Make a three phase input power supply that supplies 36 volts DC; nice low ripple DC even without much capacitance. This will supply ample 36 volt DC for the power needed to drive things.

Get, or make, an inverter that synthesizes 120 volt AC from the 36 volts DC supply and use this for running the control devices.

Nice balanced load on the generator.

Would it work or does it require a lot of surgical manipulation on the lizards or just way too much building and modification?