Large 17' Homebrew Wind Turbine
Page 4
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This is 'page 4' of the project. The goal was to build a simple 17'
wind turbine, basicly a scaled up version of earlier machines we've
built which are very much inspired by Hugh Piggotts 'Axial Flux' wind
turbine plans. The previous 3 pages detail some of the construction of
the machine. This page will talk about finishing up, raising the tower
and wiring it in.
PAGE 1
Frame fabrication and alternator design procedures |
PAGE 2
Frame finishing and alternator fabrication |
PAGE 3
Alternator and blade assembly |
PAGE 4
Installation on tower and raising! |
The first step is to get the machine up on the tower. It's a simple
arrangement--the tower top has a stub of 2 1/2" pipe, with a thick flat
'washer' welded on the end. There is a plastic bushing on top of that,
and then the machine simply slips over the top of the tower and rests on
the plastic bushing. The wire goes straight through the tower, up
through a hole in the wind turbine, so as the machine turns the wire can
twist. At the bottom of the tower there is a heavy 3 prong locking plug
that we can unplug to occasionally allow the wire to untwist if
necessary. The machine itself, not counting the blades or the tail,
weighs 160 pounds.
Pictured above we have it completely assembled and ready to go on the
end of the tower.
There's another picture of it before we raised it. We balanced the
blades in this position. To balance the blades we simply let it turn so
the heavy part comes to the bottom (6 O'clock). Then we lift the heavy
side up to the 3 O'clock (or 9 O'clock) position and add weight opposite
it, until it seems to be balanced. These blades came out almost
perfectly, we added about 8 Oz to one side of the hub. Lead makes nice
stuff for balancing - wood screws go right through it. Scott brought me
up some lead 'decoy' weights (used for weighting down duck decoys) -
they are perfect for the job and available at sporting goods stores.
My tower is 60' high, I raise and lower it with my truck. It's much
heavier now than it used to be with my old 14' machine, not only is the
machine heavier - but I added probably 150 pounds to the tower itself to
strengthen it. On top of that, we had 10" of snow. My only chance at
pulling it up was to chain up all 4 tires and fill the truck with wood.
Once I did that, it was no problem. The first step before I raised the
machine was to raise just the tower and make sure it worked OK. Then I
raised the tower with just the alternator to see if it would handle the
weight (so I wouldn't chance breaking the blades). Once both those
things went well, we raised the machine with no problems.
There's a picture of just the alternator on the tower top.
That's how it looks up on the tower!
Here's a picture from the back side I took on a windy day. I played
with my camera to make the blades look like they're running perhaps a
bit faster than they really are.
Here it is pictured all furled up in a very high wind. So far it's
withstood winds over 60mph a few times with no problems.
So far the machine works quite well. It has such a huge swept area compared to our previous machines that it seems to start up in practically
no wind, and it's making a little power by the time the anemometer says 5
mph. At 10 mph it's doing around 400 watts and at 16 mph it's up around
1.5KW. Above that I believe the blades are overpowered a bit by the
alternator. I do see 2KW from it frequently and I've seen about 3800
watts from it a couple times in very high winds, but overall I believe
the blades are held back a bit in higher winds by the alternator. I can
improve it by adding a bit of resistance to the line - this would allow
it to speed up in higher winds and the blades would run more efficiently
- but as it is it seems very slow and peaceful, and it rarely goes over 200 rpm
It's producing quite a bit more power than I can really use. So
I'll leave it as it is, it's quite a good low wind machine I think.
Time will tell how it holds together! It has been fun, the whole
project took 3 weeks from start to finish, I had some friends and
neighbors (all of which have their own homebrew wind turbines) helping
along the way which was wonderful.
PAGE 1
Frame fabrication and alternator design procedures |
PAGE 2
Frame finishing and alternator fabrication |
PAGE 3
Alternator and blade assembly |
PAGE 4
Installation on tower and raising! |
©2005 by FORCEFIELD
This page last updated 1/2/2008