My El Cheapo Turbine Project

[Arletta]

Today, 48 hours after the idea for a homemade vertical axis savonius type wind turbine began to hatch in my little brain, I made two prototype turbines out of plastic soda bottles, with pencils for axles. Fine craftsmanship with a swiss army knife and duct tape distinguishes them both. I only cut myself once.

The first turbine is a good example of what happens when people think they know what they're doing but really don't. It looks like a cake mixer blade- each vane is concave (or convex, if you're an optimist) on four opposite sides. Like two opposite facing "S's" when viewed from the ends. According to my Jr. Weather Station wind gauge, it rotates at 4kt.

Having now belatedly looked in my alternative energy book for an illustration, I made another turbine. The second one is more artistic and less plastered with duct tape. I didn't twist the vanes on this one, just cut them into nice tapered aerodynamic looking shapes. Possibly because of the comparatively minimal duct tape, this one rotates at 1 kt. Maybe if I made a hundred of them I could produce a free watt.

Tomorrow, weather and time permitting, is the day I build the full size turbine from a 5 gallon plastic bucket. I need to get a length of pvc pipe for the axle, find an alternator, find out if there are horizontal and vertical alternators which there no doubt are because just scrounging one from a junked vehicle would be too easy, get a charge controller and a gauge,then crawl up on the roof and set the whole thing up. Actually how I'm going to connect the vanes to the axle is still unclear. Probably duct tape will work.

Updates as the project develops.  

[Demetri]

I've done something similar to your 5 gallon bucket contraption. I used a steel pipe instead of a pvc pipe though. I used a plain wooden bearing up top, lubed with axle grease. On the bottom I had to be more imaginative. I used a cap for the axle pipe. I drilled and tapped a hole in the center of the cap, and tightened a bolt into the hole, with a nut on the other side, so that the long chunk of the bolt stuck out of the cap when the cap was mounted on the pipe. No loctite on hand, but JB-Weld worked just as well(Someone on the board has a saying, anything worth building is worth overbuilding. Love that quote.). I ground the bolt end down to a point and drilled partway through a chunk of steel I had laying around, creating a dimple for the sharpened bolt to ride in, and screwed the steel plate down to the base. Little grease, and the thing worked great. I attached the buckets to the pipe with 1/4-20 bolts and large fender washers, going through the pipe. Had to brace the buckets with chunks of wood top and bottom. The wood was press fit onto the axle, and held in place with(you guessed it) JB-Weld. I never put a generator on it, just wanted to see if the neighbors would bitch about it(they did), but it started and ran when there was too little breeze for me to feel. Never got to speed test it in a good wind, but in the garage with the blow nozzle it'd go fast enough to become a blur without destroying itself, but that doesn't say anything about real world activity.

Good luck.

Demetri