[marc hildebrant]

Joe K,

Yes, you can make an analogy with the battery as a "fly wheel".

tbirdbird...For a generator that has the field connected to the armature, the device becomes a constant current device. The adjustment, third brush, decreases the amount of armature voltage, but the important thing is that the amount of energy to the field is directly related to the amount of energy from the armature.

Voltage regulators vary the amount of field current to keep the voltage constant.

Hard to describe the operation in detail as a lot of "electrical" stuff is needed , but the important thing is that the generator puts out a fixed amount of current set by the third brush and the battery takes in the "extra" that the car's electrical load doesn't need.

Marc