Building a 1kW Wind Turbine For Under £100 Part 4 - Finishing The Body

[Music] so in this last video in this series we lashed our wind generator up into a cradle to give it a quick test to see what kind of power output we'd get i put in one's coil and had a look at the amps and the vaults and the to panel with it by spinning by hand which i thought was kind of awesome actually but because i lashed it up i couldn't show you some of the detail now this is the rotor it's uh 0.8 of a meter across incidentally and we're looking at the bottom end and i promise to show you the magnetic arrangement and here it is it's a whole load of ceramic magnets these are four and a half centimeters by two and a half centimeters by one centimeter thick they have 3.5 kilograms of pull and there's 72 of them in that ring all i did was glue them on north south north south north south and then put a lot of resin in them to hold them all fixed so that is how i've attached the magnets now i think he's probably going to stay but i'll soon find out i mean a lot of this actually is just me doing trial and error now before i began on this wind turbine stuff i didn't know that much i've learned quite a lot by doing it and by doing the investigations that we've been doing on this i think i've acquired a reasonable amount of knowledge to see if i can actually build one of these things now our big aim here is twofold one is to make it really really cheap and i had to spend some more money and i'll show you later what i spent some money on but is to make it really cheap under 100 pounds the other is to get it comparable to a one kilowatt commercial generator so we want a direct comparison now i'm taking up with the idea that there are two approaches to this you can put something on the axle in which case you need high torque and you can put something on the rim of a big wheel in which case you need low torque because the low torque high speed of the rim in my mind is equal to the high torque low speed at an axle so i'm not going to be attaching anything to the axle i won't be putting the motor on here won't be put any gearing on there if i want a faster speed i would make the wheel bigger because that's the whole point of this is to demonstrate low torque high speed so that's what we're after a um budget build doesn't cost too much takes advantage of low torque and high speed and aims at competing with a one kilowatt commercial generator now i've had a few personal people saying that'll never do a kilowatt and i thought well i don't know to be honest but i do know that commercial kilowatt generators never do a kilowatt if you get a 25 mile per hour wind on them sure they'll generate a kilowatt but as the average wind speed here in the uk is about 10 to 12 miles an hour the average output of a one kilowatt generator is somewhere between 70 and 100 watts it's really quite embarrassing and really quite ridiculous that you would pay 2 000 pounds for that kind of output they're saying so far it's cost me uh 48 pounds actually and because of because the extra spend and i'm expecting a similar performance to a commercial one kilowatt generator now will it produce a kilowatt i don't know and that's going to depend on the wind speed isn't it i mean what is it um area squared wind speed squared something like that i don't know but it's going to be dependent on the wind speed to what it outputs if we get a wind speed of 10 miles an hour and it outputs 150 watts we have beat a commercial one kilowatt generator and i'd be happy with that if we do get a 25 mile an hour wind and we get a kilowatt out of it that'll be awesome but i'm not really expecting a 25 mile an hour wind on the days that i look to test this we're going to have variable wind so we'll see okay when i lashed this up now put it onto a pellet with the foot and then we put some arms around it and then we put a single coil and of course i'm going to put other coils but a single coil and tested it now i thought that looked really quite scrappy actually and we've done a nice job on this we've done quite a lot of detail on the rotor and i was quite pleased with the the way it's looking the way it's been built but personally i thought the palette was a little bit scrappy now a friend of mine donated another um whiteboard another smartboard which remember is that aluminium honeycomb so from my aluminium honeycomb i cut to one meter section [Music] as a top plate and a base plate i did a diagonal diagonal at the center i've got a socket to take the axle of the turbine and then i put aluminium here angles these were recovered again from a display stand actually aluminium angles here on those diagonals and we're going to put baffle plates in there in the same way that we did on the pallet but this whole thing now we're going to be free standing so the rotor goes in here and the baffle plates are go on there let's attach those okay so now all i've done is put the rotor in its little socket slid the battery baffle plates into the aluminium angles and um screwed the baffle plates in with some self-tapping screws now i've got an identical player to remember i made two of these and there's an identical plate one we need to buy one meter with exactly the same arrangement so we got a central socket we've got the aluminium angles to take the baffle plates in that central socket is a 12 millimeter hole and at every corner see if i can show you one of these right there is another 12 millimeter hole and this is what i spent the other 15 pounds on i bought five of these these are 12 millimeter threaded bar one meter long they go through the holes and through the center and everything bolts down so all i now have to do really is pop this top on put the bolts through and bolt it all together now i've made it in this collapsible form because of course i've got to take it on the roof and if i can break it down and carry it then no problem at all the whole thing actually weighs 30 kilos or less it's 19.4 kilos for the central rotor all told these plates here are quite light i don't think there are 11 kilos i'm not quite sure what they are so the whole thing is less than 30 kilos but let's put this top plate on now there it is in its vertical orientation with its baffle bars its threaded bars all fastened together and it's pretty free spinning obviously the coils go under here and this section here which is why that's so deep and that will actually fit a microwave oven transformer coil so that's probably where i'm going to be well that is where i'm going to be putting them actually and i put it in the vertical orientation here but to be honest this could equally be in a horizontal orientation now i've got one more threaded bar to put in and that goes through that central axle remember that central axle it's a pipe there's one more threaded bar to put through that central axle and that means turning it on its side so i'm going to do that and leave it in that orientation when i put that bar in okay so that's it in its vertical orientation so like i said you could either have it horizontal or vertical if you wished um actually it really is a thing of beauty i actually think it looks a bit like a tie fighter in fact now we've got these bars sticking out the bottom here and either we could sort those off use the or use those i mean if it does need more fixing down then obviously these would be a great place for guy uh wires you have to guy wire it down uh equally there'd be standoffs for feet something like that so i'm not sure whether i'm going to sort those off or not i'm probably going to leave them on for now anyway that's what entire build done though and it was these bars here that cost me the extra 15 pounds but i think well worth it to really stabilize the entire structure actually much better like this i think than when we had it on the pallet and obviously this still breaks down so that i can actually move this and carry it really easily so it's much more stable quite a lot prettier and i think um really more useful in that you can put it in two orientations but that is the generator build finished there won't be any changes to this now all i have to do now is stick my coils in here so that's the next thing to do obviously is put the coils in again give it a test again we've got absolutely no wind at all otherwise i would have taken this outside and put it in but i'm expecting this to rotate pretty freely actually and you can see that you know if i give that a gentle push with my hands and you can see that rotating really quite through them really quite nicely and very level which is sort of cool so this is approaching finished we've probably got one more video with the coils in place and then we'll be up on the roof so i hope you're enjoying the series and thank you very much for watching and now there is one other thing actually i think i forgot to mention people have been asking for plans for this now because there aren't any plans because what we're doing is making this from whatever scrap we can find but the general idea is that idea of um low talk high speed so we're using discs that can be driven with this squirrel cage rotor and pretty much anything we'll do to be honest that will do that job so there aren't any real plans for it outside of the video one guy actually did post uh he watched i think it was video two or maybe video three probably video three uh which was the last video and he said um huh i can't build that from this video there's not enough information it's true you can't build it from one video you would need to watch the video series so please do and all of the information is contained in the video series and like i said i'm unlikely to do plans anyway thank you for watching and i hope you're enjoying the series so far

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 330,341

Keywords: generator, HAWT, VAWT, fwg, robert, wind, power, energy, generation, turbine, murray-smith, how to, off grid, make, build, home, made, built, dt, design, alternative, disruptive, technology, stem, steam, industrial, arts, recycle, recycling, upcycle, upcycling, engineering, science, fair, project, system, renewable, green, environmental

Id: M0_ekm_oLTc

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020