17 Oct
2007
17 Oct
'07
5:45 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
These days. Not so true in decades past, however...
It may be
European vs US usage, but in the US "motor" almost always
means electric motor in this and other contexts. So what you
That tends to be UK usage too. The thing under the bonnet (OK, hood) of a
car is called an 'engine' over here. 'Motor' for that would be very
uncommon. I don't know how common these other term are
across the Pond, but an
'alternator' is an AC-output geneterator
Yep; the sorts of big power-generating equipment I've worked on were sometimes
referred to in the docs as "motor alternators". "genset" is another
common
term, implying a generator hooked up to some kind of device to drive the
generator (and quite often prefixed with something to imply what that device is)
, a 'Dynamo' (short for 'Dynamo-electric
machine' is a generator, normally
DC output, with a wound field
I've never done any playing around with big stuff that has direct DC output,
although at one place though the power plant was AC but there were rotary
converters around to spit out 400VDC...
I suspect it's one of those things where the terms change depending on what
time period's being talked about and also depending on the size of the
equipment involved.