Need people with knowledge on building small wind turbines

drunken_munky52

Anyone out there care to share ideas on the subject?

Shiny

How small?

I'm hoping to build a small Vertical Axis turbine this year at some stage.*

*Depending on funding allocations :rolleyes:

Ball_of_Sex

I built a 1kW radial flux PM generator with a laminated stator core last year.

It was a huge amount of work and the magnets, copper and silicon steel is very expensive.

I design it and did a lot of the work my self but I had technicians do most of the hard work.

For a wind turbine download the Huge Piggot guide and follow it rigidly!

winit

wondering does anyone know where i could get a 15ft+ strong pole to put my wind turbine on.. not expensive and even better for free..

mawk

i built a medium sized one last year. i think youd be better off taking the invariably not tiny ammount of money the build will cost, and put it towards your esb bills.

but then i like the build more than the result in projects, so im regretless

drunken_munky52

Anyone care to follow up with details on charge controllers, invertors and battery banks for a wind turbine?

Does a battery charge with AC directly from the wind gen or would it need to be cleaned up to DC before entering the battery bank?

Shiny

The battery would need to be charged from a DC supply. The turbine would
need to be connected to a rectifier to convert its output from AC to DC.
You would also have to make sure to get Deep Cycle batteries unlike car batteries which don't like being discharged.

I have seen people recommend batteries from Camper vans, Boats and even
small forklift batteries as viable options for storing the energy from the turbine.

drunken_munky52

Was thinking of building a 100-300 watt turbine... anyone any ideas?

Was looking up generators... I need a good voltage from low RPM... coz I wanna make the blades from less than a metre of quartered PVC pipe

AC 3 phase is out of the question I would say if thats my criteria... anyone care to comment of this?

Would anyone suggest using a DC motor as a generator? If so, is there a motor in a device anywhere I could use for this?

All I am interested in is charging 1 or 2 lead acid batteries and inverting this to AC

Cheeble

Try your luck on the Renewable Energies thread: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=1041

Lots of posts over the last year on this topic.

Cheeble-eers

powerfarmer

Have a look on reuk.co.uk, loads of information there on small and medium scale turbines

drunken_munky52

Before I leave this thread, I am just wonderingif any engineers could answer this key query:

I want to run a DC motor as a DC generator which will attach to my blades directly.

Taking into account torque, voltage and RPM, what is the best type of DC motor to acquire?

From researching on the net, people have said that a 300RPM 99V motor is the king of motors to be used as generarors. Anyone know what kind of machine would have such a motor?

Can anyone explain what spec of motor I should look out for and why? From what I understand, a motor that is meant to run at high RPM is no good as a generator. So is a high voltage motor that runs on low RPM better?

powerfarmer

From what internet research I've done on this ,the best type of motor is a permanent magnet DC type, low speed preferably,but most of those online who built wind turbines obtained those motors from old mainframe computer systems, or surplus companies which appear to be plentiful in the US. A treadmill motor is supposed to be similar but I imagine scrapped treadmills are not too easy to come by.

Permanent magnet DC motors used to be common on variable speed applications in industrial machines, comveyors, mixers etc, but (where I used to work) are being phased out by cheaper AC inverter drive units.
I suggest keeping an eye out for a DC motor off a scrapped industrial machine, Baldor and Emerson were common brands of PM Dc motor which may be suitable but most of the ones I came across were 180v not 99v. Maybe a motor from an electric wheelchair drive or electric golf buggy would work?

Recently came across these guys, a build your own wind turbine centre:
http://www.islandmcgrathecofarm.com/

Cake Man

Hi lads,

I'm doing a wind pump (windmill waterpump) for my final year project, it's basically a windmill that turns and this energy is used to turn a cam system that pumps a rod (up and down motion) and pumps up water (exactly like the old fashioned hand pumps).
Trawling through the net for info and its hard to come by, ders just so much. Not really sure how many blades to use for the windmill (needs to be enough to create enough power to pump water up the tube/pipe). Any idea how many blades would be feasible?
Also not too sure how the pump system works, was going to go with a vacuum type system and just keep it as simple as possible, don't wanna get too bogged down with electronic systems or the like. Anyone have any idea of a simple vacuum system that will work?
As soon as I can get an idea of these, I can start thinking of sizes/dimensions.

I'm kinda aiming this project to be a scaled down model so it doesn't (and probably won't anyway) be 100% efficient.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, cheers lads.

Ball_of_Sex

drunken_munky52 wrote: »

Before I leave this thread, I am just wonderingif any engineers could answer this key query:

I want to run a DC motor as a DC generator which will attach to my blades directly.

Taking into account torque, voltage and RPM, what is the best type of DC motor to acquire?

From researching on the net, people have said that a 300RPM 99V motor is the king of motors to be used as generarors. Anyone know what kind of machine would have such a motor?

Can anyone explain what spec of motor I should look out for and why? From what I understand, a motor that is meant to run at high RPM is no good as a generator. So is a high voltage motor that runs on low RPM better?

PM single phase Washing machine motors work well, google it, ive seen guides where people have used the motors for mircowind before.