Homebrewed Electricity > Hydro
A thought I keep kicking around
joestue:
its better than nothing but gas turbines are designed for compressible air, not water.
for example, you can build an HVAC condenser fan that's 50% better than the competition if you can ensure that there is only 1/32" inch of clearance between the fan blades and the ducted air entrance. same kind of things go for water.
you can throw a ducted axial fan blade assembly made from bent sheet metal inside a pipe and get some power out of it. if you tilt the fan at 10 degrees you can have the shaft exit the pipe at a tangent and only lose maybe 10% of the power. it costs almost nothing but time to experiment with different blade angles.
while its easy to change the angle of the ducted blades at the inlet, its not easy to build a variable pitch kaplan style blade. but i don't think you need to for a 2:1 ratio of flow, if you're not concerned with the last 20% of available power. just change the inlet vanes and adjust the generator power curve.
dnix71:
Some of your blades look remarkably like vacuum cleaner fans.
This one is the impeller from a Hoover.
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