Raising Bill

[DanB]

We had a good/busy time over 4th of July weekend working towards raising Matts 15' wind turbine.  Some details about it, and similar machines are HERE.  There is a page about making his blades HERE.

Pictured above is the machine assembled on the tower.  It's been sitting that way not for about a month.

Click Here to see a page about assembling the machine, and some small measures we took to strengthen it.

The blade was surprisingly not too badly out of balance.  For balances, we cut bits of angle iron and bolted them to the hub in such a way that perhaps they'd help slightly to cool the stator.  You can also see that we cut pieces of angle iron, and put them on both sides of the hub, with 1/2" bolts through them, tightly squeezing the hub/blade asssembly together.  This should hopefully make it a bit stronger.  Thankyou to Victor (5KW) for this suggestions!

Pictured above is the tower almost finished.  It's a nice spot, on a ridge top where the lodgepole pines are fairly short.  We had to cut about 40 trees to make room.  The tower is 43' tall, made from 3" pipe.  The top 10' is reinforced inside.. hopefully its rigid enough for the 15' machine.  The idea for this machine is to furl early, so that should help.  The base of the tower is 5' long and 4' wide, made of pipe, and the tower pivots (pipe over pipe).  It's staked down.  The Jin pole is also 3" pipe, 16' long.  They guy wire mounts are of re-bar, epoxied into rock.  One reason we chose this spot.. it's fairly flat (about as good as you'll find up here), and we had 4 nice spots for guy wire anchors in rock.

Here Matt, and a few neighbors (most of which have built wind turbines now) are assembling the machine on the end of the tower.

And there it is!  It went up pretty smoothly.  It was pretty still, and in all honesty - the performance kind of blew my mind.  It's a 24 volt machine, and it was very quick to produce 15 amps in what seemed nearly still air.  A couple times what seemed a fairly light wind came through, we saw well over 1000 watts.  Only once I saw about 1500 watts, at which point it was just starting to furl.  So far so good, we'll see if the blades and the tail stay on and hope the alternator doesn't melt!  Time will tell...

Lots of fun anyhow.

[zubbly]

hello DanB / Matt!

beautiful job on the genny and looks just great!

Isn't it an exilerating feeling when you first see the amps start pumping out.

have fun and keep us posted on the results

zubbly

[veewee77]

OK, Testing is comlete. . .

Send her on down, now!

Check's in the mail!

DS

[monte350c]

Hi Dan,

Since this is the biggest one yet(!) I've been following along to see how it's been going with great interest.

A couple of quick questions -

Are you comfortable with a 15 foot rotor - do you think this could have the potential to be bigger still?

Now that it's been up for a couple of days, do you guys have a feel for how much juice is coming out of this setup? I looked on one chart I've got in Excel and when the windspeed gets up into the mid to high 20's in mph there could be 5 or 6 KW available on the blades. Wow.

Ted.

[MattB]

Hi Ted,

I don't know about what the potential might be, but so far the mill is working great. I'm getting an almost constant 5-10 amps at the batteries in seemingly zero wind. Highest I've seen yet was 55 amps (about 1300w), which is where it furls. In the last week though, havn't had much in the way of sustained winds. I expect I may see near 2kw in the right winds, and I sorta hope never to see more. That could get scary.

I don't have an anemometer yet, so I can't really get any proper wind speed/output measurements. And I can't see the turbine and the ammeter at the same time. I can only watch one at a time. Perhaps I'll get a hand held anemometer and some walkie talkies or something.

The 15' blade is holding so far. I expect if we do a bigger one, we'd definitely beef up the design a good bit using bigger bearings and the like.

We'll keep the board posted when we get more details...including, of course, if/when the thing blows up.

cheers!

-Matt

[DanB]

Hi Ted -

its working nicely I think with the 15' rotor, but ...

with this alternator, my inclination (to do it over again) would be wind for a slightly higher cutin speed and go back down to 14' to be a little on the safer side.  Perhaps that is even pushing it... or... perhaps were fine @ 15, hard to say, time will tell!