yea, that was me. This one is a lighter weight plastic. The first one I couldn't get enough airflow in my 10ft poly sheet chimney to raise the plastic foils up(even with mosquito candle).They were a 6mil plastic. This one is grocery bags. I am interested to see if the UV kills it before the wind does. A final version would probably use j-channel to hold the plastic on(instead of duct tape).
As a savonius(drag type) turbine this one would need to be mounted on a pivot(hawt). I don't know what it actually takes to make it spin. This morning the light breeze (cigarrette smoke between 5 and 15 deg. from vertical would make it wiggle just a little- somewhere around 45 deg smoke from vertical it starts to move- at the point the smoke is horizontal turbulent from the end of the cigarrette it runs wide open----any idea what wind speeds those are (less than .25 m/s??).
for my chimney(vawt) (probably gonna end up methane powered rather than solar) it would sit just above or just inside the top of the chimney.
Only real plus to this ,rather than conventional bucket savonius ,is the airflow is all one way-it never has to fight the uphill side. In the gusty wind I had (no idea MPH-weather man said 21mph) it ran about 100rpm-would get there pretty quick(five ten seconds). I have video but it is a really huge file (.mpg).
I have been looking into hot air balloons (
www.overflite.com) and kite theory to see if there are any simple rules of thumb I could apply to it. (1/3 radius foil hgt???, etc.,1/3 diameter?
).
Curious thing to me was that when the wind was blowing gusty the wrong way, changes in the wind speed would pop the foil part way open and make it turn.
anyway, L8r,
Mike