Build Your Own Wind Turbine

Wind tunnel testing of a 1.8 diameter wind turbine based on the design of Hugh Piggott. The first set of wind turbine tests will result in a powercurve for the potential aerodynamic performance for different types of loads on the turbine. From a second set of wind tunnel tests the real powercurve will result. In this test the complete generator system including the battery will be tested. From this test also the furling behaviour will be identified. 

Hugh Piggott says on his blog
"I am not sure that the wind tunnel will give a realistic idea of the way the turbine furls in real winds, but the testing is bound to reveal ways to improve the design".

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Checked the bearings the front one is ok but the back one is past it I don't normally leve the seal on but this one looks like it held the water in!

You can see the race is worn 

Good bearings they lasted four years and were made in Romania.

Cutting off all the old tape on the coils.

It looks like the stator survived the over-speed session the copper doesn't look burnt which is more that can be said for the tape.

Found a nice big air pocket and you can see how the tape couldn't stand the heat. But it might have helped to cool the stator as it seems to be good at holding water that's what the drops are in the hole and the tape on all the coils had water in it.

The students from the Yombo Vocational Training Center have to live with a disability. But this doesn't mean that they are disabled in general, or even worse: 'un-able' in general. That's what we have proven with this outstanding performance. In the past two weeks students, teachers and instructors from 'I Love Windpower' have worked together intensively. We started with pure building materials from scratch. Slowly parts of the wind turbine were emerging. After one and half week the wind turbine was ready and tested on a low tower at the school. And a few hours ago, we erected the turbine on the tower that we also build ourselves.

Yesterday we went to the site, where the turbine is installed (CCBRT-hospital in Msasani area on the Peninsula). An 18 meter tower was erected with the whole group. Well, the group is now more than 30 students, so we made small teams which roulated during the installation of the tower. This tower has guy-wires on 3 levels. That took us a full day, which is quite normal.

Today, we had some frustration when the electric wires were blocked by the bolts which connect the individual pipes of the tower. Maybe just bad luck, because normally it is not a big deal. In the end, the wires passed the obstacles and we continued the installation. It was already getting dark when finally the turbine went up. After releasing the brake, it speeded up in the usual way. There was no time yet to measure the amount of produced power. However, this will become clear the next days.

Read the full story from Roland at I Love Windpower - Tanzania

Split the alternator and it 's not bad that two pack paint works well so a quick sanding and more paint should see it good for another two years better than buying magnets. 

Back rotor

Front rotor

Surprising that the end has not rusted the bubbles are just condensation

They also have not lifted from the disk.

The stator got rubbed a bit but it's only paint damage but you will see that the tape on the coils has bubbled through. This might be from gassing as it looks like the stator got a bit hot but seems to be ok. This was cast with polyester.

This is Illiocht's 2.4m wind turbine which we worked on two years ago.

I got a call from him over a week ago saying that he could not brake his machine and it was running wild in a storm, when we got to his place it had been running wild for around two hours, not a nice sight. This machine has all nine wires running down the mast with the rectifiers in a box at the bottom, with the stop switch on the DC side in the battery house. It looked like water got into the box and shorted out the dc end, resulting in one of the conductors melting.

I cut two wires at a time and shorted them together, this slowed the turbine down slowly and also left less volts for me to handle, I would not have liked striping a 3 phase system at that speed :) So we left it shorted for a few days as we hadn't the time to drop it and just as well because today was calm and we ran in to a problem while lowering it, someone had built a shed in the path of the top stay.

This we got around by disconnecting the stays from the anchor and adding a piece of rope to let the mast swing to the left and clear the shed. We had a few ideas on how to solve the problem for erecting the mast again from cutting the corner off the shed to moving anchors and stuff I can't print then  Niall came up with the solution to drop the mast in the opposite direction.

Smoke

Before we noticed bad shed to the left.

X marks the stay

Bent base and a nice twist. 

Captions for this photo are welcome and you might even get a prize.

Blades off.

The black paint had faded and chipped a bit not bad for two years "ideally servicing should be done once a year."  Yea right.