Dictionary of Electrical Engineering

Commonly used terms in the Electrical industry.

brush
a conductor, usually carbon or a carbon-copper mixture, that makes sliding electrical contact to the rotor of an electrical machine. Brushes are used with sliprings on a synchronous machine to supply the DC field and are used with a commutator on a DC machine.
brush rigging
the components used to hold the brushes of a rotating machine in place, and to insure proper brush tension is applied.
brush tension
the force required on the brushes of a rotating machine to insure proper contact between the brush and the commutator or slipring. Proper brush tension is usually provided by springs, and is specified in the manufacturer's technical manual of the machine.
brushless DC motor

See electronically commutated machine
brushless exciter

See rotating-rectifier exciter
brushless rotary flux compressor
a rotating machine designed to deliver pulsed output (1 MJ in 100 µs). The stator coils are excited by an external capacitor bank. The rotor is a salient structure that compresses the flux resulting in amplification of the electric pulse, by converting the rotating kinetic energy of the rotor to electrical energy.
carbon brush
a block of carbon used to make an electrical contact to a rotating coil via the commutator of a DC machine or the slip rings of a synchronous machine.
permanent magnet brushless DC machine
a machine that is similar in structure to a permanent magnet synchronous machine, containing armature windings on the stator and permanent magnets on the rotor. The permanent magnet brushless DC machine, however, is characterized by a trapezoidal flux density distribution in the airgap instead of the sinusoidal distribution of the synchronous machine. In operation, a DC voltage is applied sequentially to the stator coils to create a rotating field that pulls the rotor with it. To correctly operate, the brushless DC machine requires sensors to determine the rotor position so that the proper stator phases may be excited.
sinewave brushless DC
a permanent magnet brushless motor with sinusoidally distributed stator phase windings. More
commonly known as permanent magnet synchronous machine.
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