What do you think this circuit does?

[Tallman]

I'm sorry you guy's had so much trouble reading it. My little lenovo can make it full page by pressing and holding the control key and tapping the plus key and you can zoom right in.

The design can be used for running high power drain items as long as they are resistive.
Gloves and heated vest, pants and stockings for cold weather riding of motorcycles or snow machines. Driving lights will draw 55 watts or better so running two on a modern vtwin is out of the question since most produce less than 100 watts of power.
It also can be used to charge two batteries from one charger as long as the batteries are the same type.
Just remember DC power and resistive loads only. I actually had another circuit that would power 42 TEC's for a really large system.

 

[Tallman]

PWM. With the drive waveform shown, it should run the lights at about half intensity more or less, without resistive losses you would see doing it the old way with dropping resistors.
Then again, in the simplicity department, wiring the two light fixtures in series would seem to achieve the same result.

The resistors would not allow full brightness and doing the series routine would limit the brightness as well.

 

[Shadetree Mechanic]

This is my personal invention and it was not done for any of the complicated processes you listed. I am amused that everybody just wants to over complicate the uses.

The actual purpose for this design was to reduce the power draw of solid state refrigeration devices. These thermo-electric devices draw a huge amount of power until they get to their stabilized operating parameters. The power draw for the devices I was using would pull about 16 amperes per device on start up. One thermo-electric would not cause any significant amount of heat to be removed. They will be referred to as TEC from here on.
First we need to know what these devices do, they are true refrigeration devices.
Refrigeration is more than just making cool, it is the process in the way it makes cool.
Refrigeration means that coolness is made transporting heat from one location to another, swamp coolers are not refrigeration. They are using the evaporation of water to cause a drop in temperature. It is not transporting the heat so it is not a refrigeration system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigeration
When power is applied, one side of a TEC gets hot and the other get cool. Without a heatsink the device gets too hot and quits functioning all together. But when connected to a massive heatsink the cold side will quickly be covered in ice.

Now for industrial applications you need more capacity is needed than just one TEC can provide. In the time frame when we were making and selling these Switch mode power supplies did not have the power capabilities to operate the completed units.
Our first design was for a small cabinet containing a standard Windows based PC. The environment was hostile to electronics with high humidity and Corrosive Gasses.
A small four TEC has worked in this location just fine for the last 24 years needing only one fan replacement and one power supply.
The power requirements for a small 4 TEC unit was 64 amps and large linear power supplies of that power range were costing about $350.00 each and were unregulated.

Now for the mystery circuit. What it did was generate phases from DC input power.
One FET was on while the other FET off. Get the picture? The portion of the drawing has the description "Power Saver" is it's true design function. 50% power reduction.

There was a temperature control circuit that monitored the cold side temperature and would shut the power off when it was sated. The 40 KHz signal was generated by a simple 555 timer setup as a oscillator.
With the thermal mass involved the switching did not impact the performance in any way except when power up for the first time. The speed in which temperature stabilization was slightly longer, but when you can save about $150.00 per power supply it is obvious benefit is immediate.

We were able to run 8 TEC's on a power supply that use to support only 4 TEC's.
That gave us about 2400 BTU's with the same power supply.
.

Ok so it is complicated, just not overly complicated. Haha