I apologize in advance for my ignorance about our wind turbine. I hope my saving grace is that I am trying to learn. This latest step of learning about TSR and angle of blade attack, battery load, and effeiency of blade design has me pushing my limits of my reasoning.
Here is my main bogglle:
I added twice the battery bank, unaware of the basic principle that as the generator is loaded down of course the RPMS drop, leaving us with lower TSR.
Once Kevin returned and I had a chance to talk to him about the problems of the turbine since adding twice as many batteries, lengthening the blades (not realizing the off-set was not leaving the blades facing the wind properly, this problem I will deal with by going back to 10 foot blade set.)
We will be designing new blades, but like everything with our turbine each bit of knowledge leads one down a deeper rabbit hole. Our latest study suggests there is a lot more to this TSR power curve issue than I thought. Reading
http://www.thebackshed.com/windmill/articles/DonBrown1.asp & a basic search here of "TSR"
The notion we are kicking around now is, we need a RPM reading off the mill, combined with blade diameter to determine tip speed in various winds, then we need to know a side by side comparison of wind speed to calculate our optimal TSR. Once we can log this information, we will set the battery bank size back to where it was when our turbine was pumping out 25 to 30 amp @ 24v in good strong winds.
We would remove two batteries at a time and measure the TSR until we find the ideal load size . Then adding batteries until we figure out what a proper blade angle ought to be to keep the TSR optimal.
this make any sense to anyone?
So yeah Brian the device you are building seems perfect for testing blade design, especially if it has inputs for analog signal from a anemometer and the single phase reading from the turbine, and a digital output based on X time frame samples of both signals side by side, heck yeah