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Forum Index : Windmills : A couple of Ideas, 3 in fact!
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| Subsoiler Newbie  Joined: 18/10/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2 |
Have read almost the entire Backshed site, good stuff since it provides enough info to get into DIY wind generators. My compliments. I dismantled an Electrolux Simpson washing machine, primarily to recover the bowl to use as a fire bucket. It had a 3 phase motor direct coupled to an epicyclic gearbox. The motor has 12 stator coils with 10 permanent magnets on the rotor. The gearbox has 2 concentric output shafts, one to drive the agitator and the other to spin the bowl. Holding one of the shafts and rotating the other causes the motor rotor to turn 6 times faster. I can get 120 VAC unloaded by turning one shaft by hand with a pair of multigrips attached. I also have a 5 KW PV Solar grid connected system, which has spare inputs to the inverter, and the system never runs at 5 KW. The inverter is setup to synch to the grid when PV output voltage reaches 150 VDC. Idea is to build a wind turbine to drive the Simpson motor (as is), rectify the output and use it as an input to the PV Inverter. Output factor of the wind generator is not of concern. Any thoughts on concept. Also large commercial aircraft have upturned tips on the wings, to reduce wing tip turbulence and recover some lift at the tips. However I have not seen it on wind turbine blades, which I think would improve performance. And yet another one, some species of whales have bumps on the leading edges of their fins. Research has shown that it reduces turbulence and improves fluid flow across the aero foil. A German wind turbine manufacturer has adopted the idea. Cheers To all, Subsoiler |
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Gizmo Admin Group  Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
Hi Subcoiler, welcome to the forum. The washing machine motor sounds like its a good candidate for a wind turbine, but you'll have to do some experiments first. Need to know what RPM's equal what output voltage for a start, if you can get one person to rotate the shaft a 1 rpm using a clock, and another to measure the voltage, should give a ball park figure. Yes the winglets do help a little, as do the whale bumps, but for our small home made wind turbines, the gains are tiny for the work involved in making those modifications to a standard turbine blade. Up to you though, they wont hurt. Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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Tinker Guru  Joined: 07/11/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1904 |
Hi Subsoiler, I do have a similar motor coupled to a largeish Lenz windturbine. Mine has a similar shaft arrangement but it is a planetary gearbox. Somewhere in the past I posted pictures here how to take that gearbox apart. Anyway, even with the 6:1 gearing it spins too slowly with the Lenz to generate a useful output. A HAWT should do better but you must use a thrust bearing, I used a trailer hub. Klaus |
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fillm Guru Joined: 10/02/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 730 |
Hi Subsoiler, The name has me intrigued .... Anyway rectifying and just feeding into a solar grid inverter will not work because the way solar is MPPT tracked and given that solar has a defined MPPT track voltage but a WGT is a wild dc as the higher the rpm the higher the voltage. Its also likely you will see the turbine overloaded at cut in voltage and stalling . Then there is the 40sec connect time to comply with AS4777 and having this could in a given condition allow the turbine to exceed the inverter upper DC Volts especially when the a higher voltage PMA is used.There is a raft of reasons that can be answered with a google search. One Inverter is the Latronics PVE 2500 + Latronics TC96 and it works fine because it will allow a dump load to be switched in the event of higher Volts, I have tested the system for quite a few months with a 2.5kW 180V PMA and a correctly sized dumpload .You can pick up S/H PVE2500s on ebay or gumtree for a low cost on system upgrades.It is also above board and all aproved Other than that, what I tell the many people who contact me with this question, if you really want a wind turbine and have the resource then do mini hybyid system and power some lights TV at night when you are paying premium for power . On the winglets thing , you really need to picture the two different ways air flows over or into one is being pushed through and other the airflow pushes. Winglets on aircraft reduce the turbulent vortices created causing increased lift , if in any way they helped a wind turbine airfoil they would be common place in the commercial turbines. PhillM ...Oz Wind Engineering..Wind Turbine Kits 500W - 5000W ~ F&P Dual Kits ~ GOE222Blades- Voltage Control Parts ------- Tower kits |
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