Question for DanB

[solarengineer]

Dan I was just curious about your postings on the 17ft machine. You have had a few stator burnouts and i'm just trying to understand because I have built a clone of your 17ft machine using 18 17inch rotors..

wouldn't simply lightening your tail totally solve the burnout problem??

or is there more to it than i'm seeing?

Thank you in advance.

Jamie

[DanB]

Im not sure what you mean by 18 17 inch rotors...

Yes, I do think that lightening the tail will solve the problem.  First time I blamed it on having too much airgap, we had opened the airgap after the stator warped (it warped when a lightning strike blew my rectifiers) - we were seeing over 6KW from the machine sometimes and the blades were running quite fast.

Second time we closed the airgap back up  - but not quite as much as it was at first.  It burned out in very high winds but according to neighbors it survived most of the wind storm.  The tail boom on mine is made from sched 80 pipe - so it's a simple matter to make it quite a bit lighter, then I think itll be fine.

We're building two more like it now, with 18" rotors, slightly stronger magnets, and slightly smaller blades.

[solarengineer]

Thanks Dan, the 18 17inch was a typo... i just meany 18inch rotors!

Thanks again for the reply!

Jamie

[Titantornado]

Good Question Jamie.   I was actually toiling with the idea of asking a similar question myself, which would have been, "Are we being too greedy trying to extract every watt available out of our machines?"  I'm sure commercially available models are capable of producing much more power, but are heavily derated to lessen risk of failure.

I intend on having mine furl early.  I'll loose a lot of good power, but I won't have to be up at night worrying if it will survive.