Can You Power a Car With a Wind Turbine?

hey everyone I'm using the energy from the wind to turn this turbine and power the battery in my car so I have to use less gas why has no one thought of this before just power your car with the wind generated from the car moving in my last video I showed how there are some major limitations to using things called traffic turbines that generate power from the wind of passing cars they have to be really close to the cars and they don't generate a lot of power but then I got a lot of comments that said why don't you just put the turbine on the cars themselves well let's see if this actually works in order to do this I have a remote control car that runs off 3.7 volt batteries I also have this turbine that can get to a higher voltage than 3.7 volts so that we should be able to charge our batteries when the wind blows on the turbine let's test out the turbine now okay I have a light bulb here and I'm just going to hook the light bulb to my little wind turbine here I'm going to blow some air on it okay here we go whoa look how easily that lights up let's see how much voltage we're actually getting from this I have DC this is the voltage right here oh so that easily even volts there even just with blowing on it I can get it up to 3.5 volts so now we just have to wire it to our remote control car so I'm going to wire it in parallel with the battery this way it can be charging as it's driving what it's really doing is adding to the current so that the car battery doesn't use as much power or no power when the turbine is spinning and I've also added a one-way gate for the electricity so that it doesn't actually try to turn the windmill like it's a motor but it can only get charged from it turning so now I can hook a power source up to the car so that I'm not using a battery this way we can actually see how much power the car is using you can see that when I just turn on the car to run the electronics and lights it's using this much power but then when I use the blower and blow on the turbine it doesn't have to use as much power I can actually get it so it isn't using any power at all because all the power is coming from the windmill so you can see when the windmill was turning we were actually using zero Watts here meaning all of the Power was actually coming from The Windmill and not from the power source so let's see if that means that if we plug it and set it into the power source into a battery pack if we could actually use all the power from the windmill moving as the car is driving instead of from the battery pack itself okay so now to make this mobile I hooked up my digital multimeter to it so I have the battery current passing through this so I can see how much current the battery is having to supply okay now we've got the amp showing right here this is using .03.04 amps Let's Go full speed go so it's hanging out right around 0.62.65 okay now we're gonna take the turbine off okay no turbine okay go 0.53 [Applause] oh so you can see that when the windmill is on it's actually using more power but how is that the case the windmill should be adding more power to the car well it's true that it's adding power to the car but remember that the windmill increases the air resistance of the car so it makes it have to use more power to move forward the power source behind the wind is the car itself so you can see when I put the windmill on it and blow some air on it and don't have the brakes on it gets pushed backwards so the windmill adds extra resistance to the car that extra resistance causes it to be pushed backwards so even though you're gaining some energy from the wind overall you're losing more energy by being pushed backwards because of the frame rates it always matches the wheel for some reason so this is actually spinning really fast but you can't see it spinning but there's a slight benefit to the windmill it can actually use the ambient wind to charge the car battery a little bit but why didn't we see that benefit while driving well it's because on a non-windy day the best possible scenario is that the windmill gives back exactly the power it takes away from the car so you can get a Net Zero Energy gain but because the windmill isn't perfectly efficient we're losing energy so a lot of that lost energy is only gained back slightly through ambient wind so overall you're going to lose energy when you add a turbine to your car even on a windy day okay we have a strong headwind now go for it it can't even go into the wind but now take it off and we can go into the wind so even when there's a strong wind this still can move better without the windmill but the faster the ambient wind is blowing the more this will actually charge your car and you can get in a net positive energy but in that case the energy was coming from the natural wind outside of the car not from the car moving forward generating the wind now from the start we could have told you of course this isn't going to work if you could charge the car with the wind generated from the car moving then that would mean that the car itself becomes this perpetual motion machine that can always just keep driving never needing to stop and power up again what's funny is that this windmill that I bought from Amazon is actually marketed as something that you can stick on your bike so that when the wind blows while you're riding your bike it can light up a light bulb so the same thing would apply for the bike here the extra energy you're getting from the wind pushing against that turbine is actually causing you to slow down a little bit and that's what's lighting the light bulb if you can even get it going fast enough the only way that it can really get going is if there's a strong headwind pushing back on you and that can turn the light bulb and Light It Up so in the end I don't think we're going to be seeing very many windmill powered vehicles in the future and thanks for watching another episode of the action lab I hope you enjoyed this one if you have any comments or questions let me know in the comments section and I'll try to get to them and thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music] foreign

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 420,778

Keywords: wind power, wind generator, wind turbine, the action lab, perpetual motion machine

Id: Jp2fbwuo5Uo

Length: 7min 16sec (436 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023