Ametek motor wind turbines , for affordable micro-windpower
Harvesting the wind for energy is not a new concept. The origins of using the winds to to produce mechanical energy are lost in the mists of time . Mankind was using wind power to move his ships and grind his grain at least a couple thousand years ago. With the advent of electricity it was only natural to utilise this abundant source of raw power. Early wind turbines in the beginning of the 20Th century provided some of the first usable electricity to farms and businesses before the coming of the electric power lines. The designs of this early period are still in production nearly one hundred years later and are a credit to the original engineering. One popular method of building a small (approx one hundred watt) system is to use a permanent magnet motor from a treadmill or commercial style Ametek tape drive motor as the generator. This class of motors through much experimentation have been found to be durable, inexpensive and effective used as a small wind generator. Blades are often made from common PVC waist pipe of between six and twelve inches in diameter. Larger turbines can be created using a Permanent Magnet Alternator or PMA and other parts readily fabricated or purchased at any of the many online auction sites.these setups can often produce over one thousand watts in a stiff breeze. The smaller permanent magnet class of micro-wind turbines is usually used in remote installations for battery charging. The larger PMA turbines can power whole households or businesses. In many states a grid tied system where excess power is sold back to the electric company is also a possibility. Generally as much money and design must go into the tower that your turbines sits on, as the wind generator itself. safety must always be a primary concern in any installation. Many options exist in building ones own wind power system from pre-built units to built totally from scratch solutions. Prices can range from near free to many thousands of dollars depending on the goals of the project. A rather large Micro-wind power industry has developed recently. A good place to start is to google various wind power related search terms. Careful attention should be paid to issues such as needed power output and power storage. While potentially very rewarding this is not a project to take on lightly and every bit of pre-planning is guaranteed to pay of in the usefulness of your final installation. Ametek tape drive motors have long been used for small scale power generation. These DC motors come in 2 sizes the smaller of which can produce about 100Watts the larger 150Watts. Over the last couple years I have tried a variety of wind turbine blades. Materials have ranged from steel, to commercial plastic to over a dozen home made designs. A simple search on the Internet will yield many different techniques for creating blades of a variety of materials ranging from wood, through metal with hundreds of designs based on plastic pipes of one sort or another. I am not going to reproduce here all the possibilities but I am going to tell you what has finally worked so well for me. Wind turbine blade design is as much of an art as a science, keep in mind that we have been making successful wind power systems since the discovery of electricity. Almost any blade setup hooked to an a properly sized generator will produce some power, BUT what you use depends heavily on what your goals are. My goals were to come up with a set of inexpensive blades that could produce usable power in less then ideal conditions usingAmtec style or treadmill motors. I kept tweaking my designs until I finally accomplished these goals. My best blades are based on the typical PVC pipe blade concepts, unfortunately many did not quite perform to my expectations, what I have learned is that to produce meaningful power in low wind conditions you need lightweight blades that spin up fast to take advantage of wind gusts, with a high enoughTSR (tip to speed ratio) to spin your generator fast enough to produce OVER 12 volts this is where most designs fail. if your setup only produces 9 volts most of the time for example you will have no Joy. The first issue is what kind of pipe to use, PVC pipes come in many different thicknesses and diameters these even vary as to what part of the world you are obtaining your supply! The best I can do is describe what you are looking for. What you want is pipe that is not so heavy that the blades spin up slow or you will miss most of the power that can be produced in low wind/gust conditions. You also want pipe that is thin enough so the blades are flexible so during high wind events that they flatten somewhat preventing over-running your generator which can cause either dramatic failure OR serious shortened life span of your system, Trial an error really is the only way to accomplish these goals. Another thing I have worked out is that you can lightly thermo form your blades using heat to optimize the aerodynamics this is a bit tricky and takes some practice but does increase efficiency significantly. I have gotten ALLOT of requests for sets of blades SO I am offering some on E-bay, I am trying to keep them as cheap as possible but they take a bit of time to fabricate, Still my auctions are less expensive then if you buy all the materials for one set of blades.
Check out our E-bay auctions for some great deals!
