Building a 1kW Wind Turbine For Under £100 - Part 6 - Installing The Coils

[Music] so i wasn't going to do another video on this because i feel i've been doing too many videos on this and i was going to wait until the wind picked up take it out and do some testing in the wind and that's what was my plan however what i've done today is just awesome and i feel i have to share it with you it's kind of really cool i think so what i've done is i've actually got four microwave coils because i'm going with the microwave coil option okay i've got four of them and i put them at 90 degrees around and each one's got its own load and it's running that load and that is awesome so let me give you a quick look around it so you can see those four loads running one two three and four you get a sense of this light output let's flip the light off here you go and if we put them back on we can see that the brightness is not at full luminance but each one of those is a turn-on voltage around about 28 volts and it's drawing around about 100 milliamps or so for each one of those that's very cool indeed okay so i've connected them all up in parallel to this much larger light panel and it's lighting it up no worries at all i mean again it's not full brightness but each one of those coils is producing around about three watts or so now i've got four coils i reckon i can get six in each section so i want 24 coils all the way around there because i've got to collect another 20 coils but i'll get those collected and put on there that's going to give me about 72 watts from this speed an estimate of this speed is round about 10 revolutions per minute something like that of course we have to get this in the wind and we're doing this off the blower because there isn't any wind but still extraordinarily um convincing results i think i mean we've got four calls generating and there's no slowing down here which is just superb now when i first did this and i just connected the coils up uh both in series and parallel incidentally that would stop with the blower it wouldn't actually work and that was kind of really curious but then i did something let me give you a close-up of what i did so each of those coils has been connected to this it's a 50 volt 1000 microfarad capacitor and in the bottom there we've got four one uh 1n407 diodes is connected as a bridge rectifier then from the dc output on the rectifier we've taken it straight to the dc load the minute i added that then the whole thing began to work so i'm guessing here okay but what i think we've done is effectively put a clutch in there what we've done i think is use those capacitors as sort of like an automatic clutch and it decouples the generator from the load so when the load makes a demand on the generator just in the same way that you're trying to go up a hill or you're trying to go quickly you need to change gear that is press the clutch change the gear i think that this little capacitor network this little capacitor diode thing that we've got off of each coil is doing that job so that the generator can actually keep on spinning despite the fact that it has this load when we connected it directly it's a bit like having your engine connected directly to your wheels if you want to go fast it's going to scream and it's going to hurt the engine and it won't be able to go particularly fast just because of the restrictions on it and i think the same kind of thing was happening here because this doesn't power the load directly what it does is charge the capacitors because capacitors that they don't have much resistance to charging they're going to charge pretty easily then the load runs off the capacitors so this generator is not powering this load it's actually charging a capacitor bank that's sitting in the middle between the generator and the load and it's the capacitors that are actually firing up that load decoupling the generator and allowing the generator to spin even though it's now spinning over four coils and when i had them directly the amount of inertia to get them to spin was too great for the blower to be able to cope with and the blower was puffing away obviously but couldn't puff out enough to get it to start to spin but the minute we decoupled it it could put that enough to start charging these capacitors we don't have much demand on them and it would continue to spin so that's what i think is going on so to my mind that was absolutely fascinating hey because um when you put more coils on there what you would expect is that the whole structure takes that much more energy to get going and so in low winds it's just not going to be able to cope it just won't move if there's just a ton of coils on there but this decoupling thing that we've done allows that to move in very low winds and to continue moving while servicing a load which i thought was just absolutely fascinating to me what it means is we can stick as many coils as we like on there as long as we put that capacitor network in now i'm totally guessing well obviously we've done that with four coils and i haven't seen any slowing down which is really encouraging when you think about it so of course the plan is to collect more calls and put more capacity networks on there but we've got four so with those four we're going to do the wind testing and make some assumptions i mean one assumption we're making is that um 24 of them will act just the way that six of them are sorry four of them act or if like six of them will act just the way that four of them act i mean that's an assumption we're going to have to test that and see but if that's true what i'm saying is right that we're interspersing a capacitor allows it to run at low winds then we have here something that is approaching at that wind speed a one kilowatt generator with 24 of those we're going to generate about 72 watts and we should be able to generate that in a 12 and a half mile wind i would have thought i mean i don't know what the wind speed is and obviously we have to test that but a 12 and a half mile wind should rotate that an awful lot faster than this little blower is rotating it so we should be able to get that if we get anything more than that we're doing awesomely if we get that then we are actually performing the same as a one kilowatt generator so to me it looks very promising that this whole thing is in fact going to work as well or slightly better than a commercial generator and i think that's just awesome i mean like i said a lot of this is my guesswork don't know if what i'm talking about is rubbish or not but i can tell you that when i connected those in series on parallel there wasn't enough from this blower to spin that rotor the minute i put that little capacitor in the whole thing started turning and we could put real load on it so these real loads like i say this is um 31 volts 700 milliamps i mean obviously the turn on voltage is a bit low and it will begin to work down to about 50 100 milliamps somewhere around about there i have measured it actually and like so that's where i'm getting three watt figure from i don't know what the speed is but the rotation's roughly 10 r 10 12 rpm extremely rough but very promising stuff so i thought i'd share that with you because it's not going to change much from that we're just going to add more of those because we have to give some weather proofing to the call and the electronics again not really a challenge we can um put in a plastic bag put it in a plastic box if you read the type e65 very easy to do that sort of stuff and i'm thinking of bringing each individual wire from the coil together at the main control unit now we can do that because we're using lots of individual coils and of course in a previous video i talked about that talked about individual calls and redundancy if we wired this up as one big coil we wouldn't be able to do this but wiring up as individual coils and decoupling it with the capacitor seems to be the way forward to get something like this to begin working in very low wind speeds which it normally wouldn't be able to do and to generate in a way that can compete with the commercial app device anyway as i say i thought i'd done bit too many but that was extraordinarily exciting so i thought he would share it with you i hope you enjoyed it and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 216,588

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

Id: 34G-7KJ47SE

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020