voltage regulation

[wellesleyann]

Looking for any advice on a wind system producing anywhere from 10-70 volts depending on RPM, need to regulate down to 14 for batt. charging.  I'm thinking I need some kind of voltage regulator before running into the charge controller.

thanks for any help

JR

[wpowokal]

JR you give insuficient information for a meaningfull answer.

However, with a wind turbine connected to batteries will be held at the battery voltage(if you are designing a generator there is much more to this but).

Regulation for wind turbines is usually in the form of a dump load which is connected to the batteries and uses any power over and above the battery requirements.

allan down under

[wooferhound]

The battery will always try to keep the voltage going into it, at the voltage level of the battery itself. The battery will be sitting at 13 volts, and your Wind/Solar power will be 22 volts open circuit. As soon as you connect your open circuit Wind/Solar power to the battery, POOF ,everything is now running at 13 volts. It pretty much doesn't matter what voltage you want to charge the battery with, Your genny may be making 65 volts open, but connect it to the battery and then everything is at the battery voltage.

What happens to all that extra voltage? It's converted to amps and that is where you start to worry about your stator burning up. Once your wind genny reaches Cut-In (battery voltage) the measured volts will be the battery voltage which should be increasing slowly as it is charging. As your genny speeds up past cut-in the voltage doesn't increase, but the amps do. Under most circumstances you don't have to worry about the voltage of the device you are connecting to the battery, your worry will be with the ability of the charging device to deliver the Amps without burning up.

When Charging a battery try to keep the current going in to less then 10% of the capacity of the battery. For Example: a 100 amphour battery should be charging at 10 amps or less.

With a wind generator you don't normally use a Charge Controller, you would want to use a "Dump Load Controller" to keep your batterys from over charging

I'm hoping this is helping . . .

[wellesleyann]

Thanks for the input

[wellesleyann]

thanks for the input

[Jason Wilkinson]

Thanks woof, this is perhaps the easiest explanation of battery controll in so few words to be understood

Jason

[eddiematos]

Hello Tim!

I have long wondered about this matter, so thank you for explaining it in "non-electrician" terms for me!

I was hoping you could help me answer a query. I am currently building a Hugh Piggot wind turbine (taking my own sweet time), and have done a little basic reading into electrical machines and hydro/wind turbines. I am finding it hard to explain my question clearly, but here goes an attempt!:

First things first, electric machines 101:

• The higher the rpm of a wind turbine, the greater the voltage generated.
  
• The larger the electrical current that a wind turbine generates, the greater the torque exterted on the turbine.
  
  

Hopefully I've not messed it up so far! Now, the way I understand it, a wind turbine standing in a fixed wind speed has an optimum rpm at which it will generate most power. If the torque depends on the current generated by the wind turbine, I assume it can be said that:

• If the current is too large, then the torque exerted will slow the turbine down towards a stalling point.
  
• If the current is too small (i.e. tending towards an open circuit), then very little of the available wind power is being "extracted".
  
  

You explained that the battery fixes the output voltage and allows the current to fluctuate as a result. Is there not some way (maybe with an adjustable voltage regulator?) to control this current so that the turbine always operates at it's ideal rpm?

I'm pretty sure there's something flawed in my understanding somewhere...

Thanks!

Eddie

[wooferhound]

I think a MPPT (maximum power point tracker) will do that ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_point_tracker

[JimmyZ]

Thank god for this forum.All day I have been worried about my wind turbine.Last eve we had 50-70 mph wind gusts in the western NY region tnx to Ike.With my imagination running,I figured,worse case scenerio the blades are gone?But the more I thought the more worried I became.Since the turbine is connected directly to the battery,along with the dump load controller everything should be ok otherwise.Then thinking,if the winds were 50mph,that means higher voltages into the battery.What about the appliances connected to the battery?Would they experience voltage levels exceeding the requirements?According to Woof,no matter what the increase in RPM and voltage,it will remain at battery voltages.I feel better about that now.My equipment is ON all the time and I am not near the location by any means.Fortunately,the battery was dead after 2 weeks of continuous use,so the high winds were putting power into a dead 12 volt 100 AH battery.The dump load should have kicked in providing the blades are still there.I hope this theory is true.I will not know how everything is at the site until a family member checks for me.Hoping for the best.

                                                   JimmyZ