1588 Top 10 Weird Wind Turbines I have Made

[Music] hi so regular viewers of the channel might have noticed i have a slight obsession with wind turbines now you might wonder about that because you might think in your head well surely there is one wind turbine that is the best and unfortunately that isn't the case so horizontal wind turbines are great if they're high up and they have a straightforward wind windstream that flows through them and then they respond the best but in urban environments where the wind is being buffeted around all over the place so next to rubbish actually and vertical wind turbines tend to be better for that so those two things have a huge impact on the kind of turbine and which would be better in which circumstance now it is a very active market there's a lot of people researching wind turbine designs and coming up with wind turbine designs that they're quite happy to complain and to um proclaim are the best that's highly unlikely because it's a lot more than just the position that it's in you know my particular bench what i'm particularly interested in is the cost per kilowatt hour of production which includes making the turbine mounting the turbine being large parts of the cost so i'm really interested in cost-effective ways of getting turbines made that can generate power at a reasonable amount for the cost that was spent in them and that's where it really comes down to for me which is why i'm always investigating different turbine designs now i've made lots and lots of turbines and it can get quite confusing because they're all over the place so what i thought i would do is list my top 10 favorite turbines that i've made now number 10 and number it's number 10 because it's quite complicated to make is the rose turbine the rose turbine and grew up from some observations i made about fans and when i was looking at them and developed the rose turbine we came up with this but it's relatively complicated to make and although it performs quite well especially bolted onto a building the complexity of it i think is what puts it out of most people's reach in that you can't make it with them the simplest of tools i mean you can make it with fairly simple tools but you do need a degree of maths and you do need some tool set to be able to make such a thing now upright fans are ubiquitous and you find them broken all the time if you take them out you'll find one of these in them this is an upright fan rotor when in that position it performs surprisingly well as a wind turbine and of course we've used upright fans as wind turbines and made various sizes and structures of upright fan based wind turbines including the washing machine turbine that we made to create turbines using that structure so i'm quite a fan of that particularly if you find these because these are easy to find and they're ready made and really easy to construct turbines out of now it would be something that would work better if you had a whole load of them in a row to make a wind wall wind walls and wind catchers are supposed to be super efficient for the area that they encompass and that really inspired me to create the pc fan wind wall because again pc fans are something you can get really easily they're combined generators all themselves with the wind turbine element then if you put them into a wind wall with the circle drilled through the wood you get a venturi effect that goes on as well making them surprisingly efficient and they are quite fiddly to make no leading on from this and from the pc found wind wall of course we constructed a cervonius type wind wall now that was um quite heavily based on the work of an american architect who did an awful lot designs for that he never built a model he just did designs and we built various models of the savonius type wind wall which although i would say labour intensive actually was really really easy to make out of plastic guttering and glue and made a very convincing and very strong generation scheme that i'm actually hugely in favor of because you can't lose sight of the fact that some of this stuff is is just fun as you explore things and we did a winter ban out of underwear there was a bit of a joke obviously but the turbine itself is um based on a greek design that you find all over the mediterranean so the sail type turbine is what it actually is we just used a readily available material that was already cut into nice triangles and going from that of course we then looked at the umbrella turbine because looking at umbrellas as a large drag device they themselves can become turbines if just attaching the right way and stuck on an axle but we all know that umbrellas catch the wind really well so it's a drag turbine but an arrangement of umbrellas that actually makes a surprisingly efficient turbine now when you're thinking of turbines of course you can mimic nature and if you look at the seeds of the sycamore which we used to call spinning jennies they have a particular shape to them so using that as an inspiration of course we made the spinning jenny turbine which again worked quite well it was a drag type turbine because it was set at 90 degrees what happened was when it blew one lifted into the direction of the wind and the others stayed in line with the wind and those kind of designs were in fact based on very early persian designs and that led to the disc turbine which is one of my huge favorites actually we made hours out of an lp record as some cloth and i don't think you can really get much simpler than that but it was a surprisingly efficient turbine based on designs of a thousand years old that worked really well was really easy to make using basically glue and scissors and ready-made discs in terms of lps when we're looking again at persian designs of course we came up with the flap vent turbine flat vents which are these things are readily available and they're meant for exhaust so you can exhaust air through there like from your washing machine or your heating ventilation and on the window hits that it closes it preventing the wind coming coming in that design again is um essentially a persian design and when you're looking at a wind turbine like that then you're looking at a drag turbine because it wind hits there and pushes it as it goes around of course so as it goes round the window opens it and reduces the amount of drag on it and we only have the pushing or drag from the other side of it all of those were quite fascinating turbines but i think top of my list has got to be the tin can turbine the tin can turbine is a particular favorite of mine on top of the list because it's made from readily available waste materials that you can actually do with a pair of stint tin snips and put it together in the same way that we did with the savonius wind wall the savonius wind wall we used new materials we used guttering and discs that we had to cut we're actually emulating that with the tin can turbine but in the tin can turbine we're making a circle of savonius type wind wall from readily available west materials and that's why it's at the top of my list so there is a top 10 list of the turbines that i have made over the past few years based on that desire to make a turbine that can produce sufficient energy but at a very low cost so the cost per kilowatt hour is low and it can also be made with readily available materials readily available tools and anybody anywhere could make such a turbine should they wish to so that they could generate their own power anyway i thought it would give a run down because we have done so many and you can get a bit lost in them all of those videos are available actually they're just straightforward links on the channel if you have a look at the wind turbines playlist you'll find most of them in there and how i went about constructing them anyway i hope you enjoyed this video thank you very much for watching and please do remember to like and subscribe

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 16,604

Keywords: wind, turbines, generator, savonius, hawt, vawt, robert, fwg, tnt

Id: LSD_Mn7m2Xs

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2022