pb-vawt vid

[feral air]

So I uploaded a short video of the plastic barrel vawt on youtube. You can see it here.

The red ribbon in the foreground shows how little wind there is. When the ribbon is strung out horizontally the wind is 8mph or more. If you watch the video you'll see that never happens. Sorry about the poor quality, it was shot with a cheap webcam and I compressed it a little...since I'm on dialup it still took forever to upload.

It's not powering anything yet but if I counted right and my assumptions are close, that's 36rpm in a 4mph (average) breeze. That's a good sign I think.

[CmeBREW]

Thats really neat! I bet that Bear has the torque! All these many Vawt postings lately has my mind going all over the place with many ideas!

I believe I'm going to try to make one like Ben's at (gotwind.org) . Except I'm going for broke---I'm making mine go straight up 10 feet high!(actual rotor hieght)

Your video looks really good!

 

[feral air]

yup, it should produce a bunch of torque but at such low wind speeds it's not really that much. I can barely wait to get it finished and up on the pole, can you tell!?

If you're using 6" PVC, consider cutting 2 inches out of the pipe first. Here's a pic of what I mean...

Removing part of the blade seems like a bad idea but it's really not. 1 inch from each blade doesn't reduce the total area much but it does change the shape of the blade and it will give the vawt a higher top speed. Also, if you're going 10' tall, don't do it exactly like Ben's - you'll want bearings on either end at the least.

Read my "quick vawt" diary entry if you get a chance. The way that's put together makes it really solid and it spins like crazy. It should be able to be scaled up pretty easily too, it just depends on the pipe you use and whether or not the blades flex too much...but then you could add extra brackets to keep it secure in several places down the length...

..and now I'm rambling and pulling the post off-topic...ahh!

[feral air]

It turns out that my quick vawt was made from 4" diameter pipe. I never measured the piece I used for that (except the length) but then today I got a 6" diameter piece of sewer pipe (free and unused, thankfully) and there's an obvious difference.

So I guess you wouldn't want to cut just 2 inches from the 6" pipe like I said to do above - do that to your 4" pipes. I'm not sure what it should be for 6" pipes yet.