6 Bladed Wind Turbine

My girlfriend has decided that because of my exploits our electricity bill is far to high, so as an interesting project I have decided to have a go at making a wind turbine for generating electricity. This is going o be a teaser project and if all goes well, I may undertake some other types of wind generation projects.

Start of the windturbine project. I cut two lengths of 4″ plastic drain pipe in to 24″ long pieces, this pipe will make the turbine blades.

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Next the pipe has to be quartered, to do this I found a 2″ piece of square box and marked the pipe every 90 degrees. Then using a metal scribe I etched a mark along the edge, this gave me a neat cutting line.

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Shown is the 4 quarters that made up the drain pipe.

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Then I drilled a 35mm hole to give the base of the blade a curved, stress eliminating fixture.

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The leading edge of the blade was then cut away to produce an aero dynamic profiled blade and then sanded with a belt sander. I repeated this procedure to give me 6 blades.

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Rather than a typical 3 blade turbine, I decided to have a go at making a 6 blade, of course this naturally left me with a couple of extra blades which I will use as spares.

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For the generating hub, I found a wheel of a kids electric scooter, it cost around £6.00 and I feel will make a great mounting for the turbine blade assembly.

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I then welded the spindle that came with the wheel to what will become the main stay of the windturbine.

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Hub mounted on to the spindle.

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Now the tricky part, there is great debate over the best type of generator, but without going in to it I have chosen a 24volt permanent magnet motor also from a kids scooter, this will act as the generator.

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Motor fixed on to the variable tension support bracket, I just have to weld it on to the stay.

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Motor and hub assembled and connected using a toothed pulley belt.

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Front view of the hub assembly, next job is to attach a piece of ply wood which will act as the blade fixing plate, bear in mind that this project is to see if I can make a basic turbine, if all goes well, the blades and rotating assembly’s will be fabricated from exoxy resin and glass cloth, well that’s the plan.

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Blades attached to the ply with 2 bolts on each blade and then 3 bolts attaching the ply to the rotor hub.

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Rear view of the assembly.

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My friend Steve popped along to see how its all going and whilst he was about he made the tail stabiliser for me, bless him.

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A Temporary measure to see if the blade design works or maybe I am a little impatient, but anyway I setup a basic pivot and connected it to a mains cable reel as it was of a suitable length, the connections for the test were via small crocodile clips.

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Well this will provide all the electricity I will need. To be fair the wind was between zero and 4 mph so the fact that it produced any electric at all meant the design had potential and hooray the project was a success!

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It didn’t take long to realise that the higher the turbine the cleaner and stronger the wind, so we raised it a little bit, then we managed to get a constant-ish 8 to 12 volts, which powered a portable radio that I had lying around.

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I connected a 12volt supply to the motor just to check what sort of noise it would make when in use, I was very impressed with the quite running of the blades.

Adrian Bennett's Gas Turbine Hobby Website