Wind Turbine Day 15
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Notice the tail fin is now butted up to the timber.
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The first photo of the new 4 blade design plus I also cable tied a plastic philadelphia cheese nose cone on the front, it's not the best look so I'm after something a bit better.
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Day15
The turbine is much better but I would still like to see it start in even lighter winds plus I would like to reduce the max speed some how as it can reach some truly scary speeds. The good news is that it copes well & looks very robust but the high speed sound like it may take off or explode.
What I’ve tried today is to fit an extra blade, I had a spare after making 4 blades from one piece of pipe but only using 3. My blade design has proven to be very strong so no need to keep a spare blade. Although I noticed that some very expensive shop bought wind turbines come with a spare blade, but to me that seems like they know they will break so shouldn’t they design them better in the first place. I guess like most things it comes down to money.
So back to this extra blade thing, the idea behind this is quite simple, the more blades you have the easier it should start in lower winds plus the more blades you have will also reduce the top end speed. So adding an extra blade should be an ideal solution, I guess I’ll have to wait & see.
Adding the extra blade was easy, I made it exactly like the others, arranged all 4 onto a large bolt & tightened it so that all blades were 90 degrees to each other. Then I drilled 2 extra holes that went through all 4 blades to keep them at that angle. That was it really, although I had problems trying to balance the blades, I was sure that the new blade would need some sort of balancing but with 4 blades mounted it was difficult to know if it did or not. Maybe it was ok or maybe with 4 blades it is harder to detect the out of balance blades but I didn’t make any further changes & assembled it all together to test it.
One last thing I did before testing was to do a little bit more filing of the iron cores, nothing major but I had 30 minutes spare & thought it may help.
The turbine is much better but I would still like to see it start in even lighter winds plus I would like to reduce the max speed some how as it can reach some truly scary speeds. The good news is that it copes well & looks very robust but the high speed sound like it may take off or explode.
What I’ve tried today is to fit an extra blade, I had a spare after making 4 blades from one piece of pipe but only using 3. My blade design has proven to be very strong so no need to keep a spare blade. Although I noticed that some very expensive shop bought wind turbines come with a spare blade, but to me that seems like they know they will break so shouldn’t they design them better in the first place. I guess like most things it comes down to money.
So back to this extra blade thing, the idea behind this is quite simple, the more blades you have the easier it should start in lower winds plus the more blades you have will also reduce the top end speed. So adding an extra blade should be an ideal solution, I guess I’ll have to wait & see.
Adding the extra blade was easy, I made it exactly like the others, arranged all 4 onto a large bolt & tightened it so that all blades were 90 degrees to each other. Then I drilled 2 extra holes that went through all 4 blades to keep them at that angle. That was it really, although I had problems trying to balance the blades, I was sure that the new blade would need some sort of balancing but with 4 blades mounted it was difficult to know if it did or not. Maybe it was ok or maybe with 4 blades it is harder to detect the out of balance blades but I didn’t make any further changes & assembled it all together to test it.
One last thing I did before testing was to do a little bit more filing of the iron cores, nothing major but I had 30 minutes spare & thought it may help.
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