Sandia Labs link

[wdyasq]

For all wind enthusiasts, Sandia labs puts a lot of data on line:

http://sandia.gov/wind/

Much of it is technical and needs a bit more than third grade math. A lot is useful if only defining a problem Sandia labs could not cure. This is using your money and a real rocket scientist.

Lots of stuff for the fans of the VAWT in there too!

Enjoy,

Ron

 

[nothing to lose]

"This is using your money and a real rocket scientist."

SORRY TO BE NEGATIVE HERE! Do you mean like blowing up 2 or more space shuttles and a 3rd (at least) in orbit now TODAY wondering if it will land safely or explode on re-entry?

Rocket scientist? Need Another Seven Astronauts? Nasa? OOPS make that 14? Hey how about 21?? Aw hell lets shoot for 60 in 5 more years!

"real rocket scientist", hell give me land in Texas and I'll be damned if I give back the gold that crashes through my roof!!!

Crap, for real my land WAS about 100 miles away last time and none of my neighbors got anything! I don't have the land now though so it may get fallout this time, maybe $10,000 in gold with my luck since I don't own it now!

[vawtman]

Hi Ron

 Is the eggbeater the only turbine they tested on the vawtside?

 If so, it seems like a common sense waste of money.

[TomW]

Huh?

You sure talk in circles at times. Totally lost me on this rant. Take a few deep breaths and collect your thoughts and tell us what you really think.

[wdyasq]

vwatman,

Have your mother read through that site if it is too difficult for you.

Ron

[dinges]

What Ron is trying to say, in his own special way:

http://sandia.gov/wind/topical.htm#VAWTARCHIVE

[vawtman]

My mama got run over by a combine.

 Why would i bother reading all that mumbo jumbo when i have a darrius type that has taken everything ma nature could throw at it for 2 years?

 Couldnt find a crack to examine.

 Speaking of cracks and eggbeaters i never tried it.Did you?

[disaray1]

Dont tell anyone , but Ron's got a VAWT on the front of his combine. He thinks we haven't caught on. Closet VAWTophile.

David

[TomW]

vawtman;

My condolences on your moms mishap with the combine.

Why would i bother reading all that mumbo jumbo when i have a darrius type that has taken everything ma nature could throw at it for 2 years?

Uh, I must of missed your post on this one? I know you are religiously devoted to VAWTs so I cannot imagine you not sharing a posting about it if it truly has been up 2 years?

Got a link?

I read everything that comes through here but my memory could be [probably is] slipping.

Just curious if this is true where is the post showing us that it works? I am truly interested in any working DIY VAWT units.

Cheers.

TomW

[vawtman]

Hi Tom

 I call it my little guy.

 I built this before i knew wind turbine sights existed.All that held it together was 2x2(wood) rotor and 2 shelf brackets.

 What amazed me was that it would start in the slightest breeze and stayed around 120 rpms in 60+ winds.It did bend its tower(fence pole).

 Heres a pic of it in the background.

http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2007/4/16/22504/2208

 

[vawtman]

Heres another one.

 http://www.otherpower.com/images/scimages/5119/smWindThing005.jpg

[electrondady1]

gee guys, why so crusty?

wdyasq thanks for the link.(i lost my old one)

sandia is a great resource.

i know you yanks hate to pay taxes for government stuff but at least you can get real info.

up hear in canada our government spent millions on wind power experiments and you can't find out anything.

 

[vawtman]

Hi Edaddy

{I know you yanks hate to pay taxes for government stuff but at least you get real info)

 First off the guberment has no reason to get in on this.It should be up to the utilities in my opnion.Well i guess thats sorta the same thing.Darn

 Second off,What info interested you?

 Im sorry your guberment is like ours.

[electrondady1]

 hey vman, how you doing?

sorry you lost your mom in such a terrible way.

mine is gone now too . just about 3.5 years ago. it took along time and there was a lot of pain for her .

she never got to see it but i named my first mill after her, "little erma"

i think the chances of getting any real information from a private , profit seeking power corporation is rather remote.

for some reason your gov. decided to set up, or sponsor, sandia.

it would seem there mandate is to test and publish ,

ok by me of course.

 i found they had done extensive testing on savonius type mills as well as three blade drag types.

it been a few years since i have been back there and at the time i had no interest in darrius type mills.

maybe that's next. i know the information is there.

the way i see it . it's just another source of information.

[nothing to lose]

Sorry Tom.

It was the comment "your money and a real rocket scientist" that I was reffering to of course. After hearing the Space Shuttle has AGAIN been damaged and was being checked out in space to see if the heat shields MIGHT be ok and the Shuttle maybe NOT blow up this time on re-entry it got me thinking about the other 2 shuttles that blew up already, and what else was that which fell to earth, spacelab or something?

Yep, my money and real rocket scientists at work there also.

[thefinis]

The gov worked mostly with the eggbeater style but did play with S rotors some. One of the things they thought they could do with the eggbeaters was power the irrigation pumps in west Texas when the wind blew(almost all the time) to supplement using electricity and then turn the induction motors on the pumps to backfeed the grid when water was not needed. Bushland Texas was one of Texas A&M experiment stations where much of the work was done on this part of the research. It was a tall order and proved too much even with a big budget and rocket scientists. They really needed to go for one or the other. The turbines matched the power curves of water pumps well but no one can make the wind blow on demand and it was much cheaper to just use electric motors which worked any time you wanted. The problems of matching a wind turbine to a grid tied induction motor have been discussed here before.

The Sandia data is very useful and forms much of the basis on which later turbines were built by private investors. There are still eggbeaters being built and sold for power production. Failures can tell us almost as much as successes at times and much of the data on airfoils rpms stresses and loading is used in building turbines today even here. I do not think they did research on the trend I see here which is high solidity low speed vawts which do not really conform to the standard S rotor type.

Just my 2 cents worth

My combine is broke and old and sits rusting away

Finis

[Ungrounded Lightning Rod]

Sandia also did some work on improving the savonius.  They came up with a revised blade shape that gets just a squidge under 2/3 of Betz.

(So make it 23% bigger in each dimension and get more power than a darrieus could without the materials and metal fatigue issues.  Savonius rotors are strong and can be made out of sheet material - flat and bended - which is inexpensive and easy to form and join.)

Yes they did a bunch of work with the eggbeater-style darrieus, and didn't get to a really practical design.  But the latter is not too surprising:  Darrieus style mills have forces that change direction radically every rotation.   You also have turbulence when the blades are downwind of other blades or the hub.  And NASA did a bunch of work on the blade profile so it would stall-furl and produce a flat power output (at the design power for the genny/transmission) for a range of wind speeds, which throws a bunch MORE turbulence at the downwind blades - a price worth paying to keep the high TSR blades from trying to go supersonic in a storm.

With thin blades and strong oscillating forces you flex the metal.  NASA decided to build it out of aluminum to keep the weight down.  But aluminum has terrible problems with metal fatigue when it flexes, stress-hardening at a small fraction of its yield strength.  So a design like theirs, as with an aluminum-frame aircraft, has a strictly limited life - and if you don't disassemble it once it gets elderly it will do it for you.

A savonius-style rotor can easily be made out of steel (which doesn't start stress-hardening until it's flexing up to a goodly fraction of its yield strength) and the only major penalty from the higher weight is that you need bigger thrust bearings.  With a TSR a bit less than 1 you won't have any parts whipping around at 600 MPH in a storm and you can build it strong enough that the rotor will survive without furling.  AND it's self-starting.  B-)

[Ungrounded Lightning Rod]

"This is using your money and a real rocket scientist."

SORRY TO BE NEGATIVE HERE! Do you mean like blowing up 2 or more space shuttles and a 3rd (at least) in orbit now TODAY wondering if it will land safely or explode on re-entry?

For the shuttle program they threw the rocket scientists out of upper- and much of middle-management.  The MBAs they substituted ashcanned the old "belt and suspenders" approach, substituting "design for success" (i.e. assuming everything works, not that Murphy's law rules) to save money.

So let's not use the performance of the shuttles as a gauge of "rocket scientists"' competence as engineers.  The fact that shuttles manage to fly at all, despite being built by engineers under an army of pointy-haired bosses, is a tribute to "rocket scientists"' abilities.

[Ungrounded Lightning Rod]

By the way:  The use of the foamed-ceramic tiles instead of the original design's solid heat-shield blanket was one of those administrator-driven cost-saving measures.

So were the exploding solid-fuel boosters with the stiff-in-the cold O-ring joints.  (Right next to the tankfull of cryogenic liquid fuel...)

The original idea was to piggy-back on a manned, liquid-fueled, winged booster/tank that went partway to orbit then cut loose and flew back to Canaveral.  Much like they piggyback on a jetliner to return from a Vandenberg landing.

Then the solid-fuel boosters were supposed to be one-piece and towed back to an ocean-side Florida facility for refilling.  They made them multi-piece so they could give the contract to a Utah company and carry them on rail cars to Canaveral.  (Thanks, Senator Hatch.  B-(  )

The brown tank insulation that keeps falling off and bashing the tiles was supposed to be painted, with a white paint that would reflect the sun's heat, keep water out of the insulation, and hold the insulation together.  Then the pointy-haired bureaucrats figured out how much the paint weighed and how much more payload they could launch if they left it off...

[nothing to lose]

Your right of course. Not the scientists faults when costs are cut.