Rotating Ventilator For Wind Power Part 5 - Finishing And Testing

[Music] hi so this is the final bit of this really and that's about putting it together now there were a couple of points mentioned on the other videos i actually um didn't think about mentioning it when we made this what we did with the two rings is we put the split 180 degrees apart from each other so we used two bits of material mid-ring and then where the split was we put the second one with the split 108 degrees apart now the reason for that really is obvious i think i thought hey um it's like plywood the tension around the ring is going to be unequal at the point where the split is so a bit like a scarf joint you even that tension by putting the two splits on the opposite side and then it'll pull itself into a ring so that's why i did that really now the other thing that i didn't mention that i should have done was i paid considerable care to the direction in which these coils were wound i made sure that i knew where the start of it was what the direction of the winding was and where the end of it was then when i mounted them in here i actually put a mark on each of the drill holes to tell me which one was the start of the coil and made sure that every coil was in the right direction so all the winding directions are known so when i collect i connect them up i won't be connecting one with an opposite winding to cancel the coil out i'll know all the winding directions um now i can connect this in a whole host of ways obviously we're using a straightforward north south north south orientation for the magnets so i'm likely just to collect these uh in parallel or series one or the other maybe uh all as one phase or maybe three phase still haven't decided on that but that's what i've done with it now the other thing is this thing let's just take that off there we go this thing oh everything's so awkward and clumsy and oh so my finger incidentally this is like a knife edge in certain sections a little bit rough and it's also very heavy so when i pick this up um i need to pad your care and attention and sometimes i don't and that's where that came from it's quite a nasty cut but it's just me really not paying enough attention but hey such as life i suppose i could have worn gloves but you know if you're going to do stuff you've got to accept that every now and then you're going to get the cut and you just live with it so i just super glued it together and lived with it another fantastic use for super glue silver glue incidentally was invented by the americans during the vietnam war for surgery so it's brilliant for gluing cuts together i'm sure loads of people know that anyway to this what we've got here are the five stairs holding this and this rod in the center gets fixed to the base so effectively that's fixed and this rotates now we can use that we need to make sure that that's kept free but we can attach to the stairs here as long as we leave that central rod free and that's what we're going to do with the ring so this ring [Music] here is going to be attached at points on this part of the ring to those stairs this fan blade won't be attached at all so when we did this in the last video we just put a temporary um axle in there to show that it could actually generate that axle's not actually used and the fan blades in fact don't carry any weight at all this ring is carried by these stairs which is why it's not too worrying that the ring is actually really relatively heavy for this connection with the fan blade that fan blade connection is actually quite weak and the main reason for that is um i have no idea whether this is going to be good or not it's just an idea that i had from a bit of reading that i did i decided to try it we'll see if it works if it's rubbish then all i have to do is run a trimming knife down those joints and to take the fan straight back out again and then do without the fan now originally i was going to do a motor with this i thought about bolting a motor onto it and that was the first thing that i thought of doing when i started to look at this but then after um doing that thing that we did on the exercise bike and having those ideas about our speed of rotation and low torque instead of slow rotation and high torque i obviously changed my ideas about what was going to be done and i'm quite fascinated by this idea of the large magnetic ring moving slowly in the center but quickly on the external which we talked about again in a different video and so i changed the plan from the first stage plan till we got here on this later stage plan that kind of thing happens i mean i'm learning as i go as well as everybody else i've never done this before and so for me this is pretty much a learning experience too and so there's a deal of little bits of changes that go on anyway enough of that let's get this fixed in what we do to fix this in is as i say drill it out so that it's free to spin on that central axle or equally the axle is free to spin through that mark it up and fix it to the stairs so that's what we're gonna do okay so that's my central ring attached now i've actually removed this once i get it attached so that you can see how it's attached and you can see that all i've done is fasten the central ring onto the stairs using these angles i just these things that means that that bar is still free to rotate so when we fix that bar to the base and the wind catches this or the thermal updraft catches it it will rotate rotating the ring obviously so what we need to do now is put that mix into the base and we fix that bit to the base because this rotates relative to the base now with this fan i read a paper on this from australia saying that if you added a fan to this then it would improve the efficiency by about 40 percent also they claimed i don't know what they mean by that but clearly they had some idea that you got an improvement now wind direction with these things matters in the blade the way the blood is facing so being able to remove it means i can swap that blade around or i can just do without that fan blade if it actually doesn't make an improvement or not i'm going to try it with it and of course we're going to test both directions with and without the fan blade added also if i did want to play with it then i could change the profile of these blades so it can be handy to remove that fan blade i left the fan blade in while i've marked everything up because then i knew the center then i removed everything and then i fixed it all down and now i can put the fan blade back in because this fan blade remember carries no weight all the weight of the ring is carried by these stairs and this upper structure okay that's enough blabbing let's get this bit fixed to this bit so to fit this thing was a piece of cake because we made it the right size all i did was remove those central stairs put the ring in and i removed the central boss because that central boss was just for that demonstration put the ring in and then fastened everything back together now the stairs did go at the top here so where the stairs went there we go i just found some very short screws and screwed those into where the stairs were otherwise it gets even flimsier so the whole thing has now been screwed to this plastic ring but the stairs have been moved and you can see here we've got a couple of drill holes where i re-marked it and the stairs will actually go in there as luck would have it [Music] that central bath will actually reach through the ring and reach the new position of the stairs which is great so all i have to do now really is slot these two bits together bolt the stairs back in okay so there it is all back together there's the uh coils ring there's the magnets ring that actually i did have to extend i sawed the bar off and used a 12 millimeter extension bolt and then put some 12 millimeter bar in it it's no surprise i mean i did drop the stairs so i had to extend that so i really only got one job to do and that is why the cause together and then i get it in position and see if the thing will spin and see if it will generate [Music] now of course this is a learning exercise for me as much as anything else and um if i were to do this again what would probably do actually is stiffen up the stairs they're fairly flexible so there may be problems with that we're going to find out anyway so let's get it in a position okay there it is to set up to read volts and i can tell you it's spinning quite well even in the lightest of breezes i mean it's actually turning a lot slower than it looks probably because it's there's just not enough wind to do very much but it is actually moving that now i've got these wired in parallel actually okay well to be honest actually i think that was really kind of impressive i mean i did wire it in parallel so we got more amps and we got volts volts was sort of like two to three volts something around about there but we were getting a good two or three amps out of that so that's a good what somewhere between six and nine watts i suppose now we really didn't have a particularly strong breeze but it had no trouble turning at all um obviously it wasn't on the load obviously i did the vaulting out separately so it's telling you that there's um it's going to be some error in those measurements and i'm okay with that i mean it's also telling you that the damn thing is working in principle which i'm even more okay with so i thought it was pretty cool actually now i did have a lot of trouble centering it and so there was quite a problem with it rubbing for ages it took quite a while sort out and that's really to do with the quality of the build of this i mean it's not really meant to do what we're doing with it so it is a little flimsy for that but i really like that idea and clearly it can be made to work now i don't know if you saw it i certainly did when i was putting this together i saw a doctored fan so i think it it would be a good improvement to ducted fans as well as these roofline ventilators and it's sort of um building on that idea that we looked at when we were doing the exercise bike now traditionally what you do is you bolt a motor onto the center and for something like that you need quite a bit of talk to turn it especially if you're going to make it do work and it's just the same principle as a lever if your point or your lever is uh away from the thing you're trying to lift and you leave is very short then it takes a lot of effort to move it if you have a long lever and um your fulcrum point is near it takes very little to effort to move it but more time uh or if you like more speed and of course we've come right out on this circle it's a good two foot across so the speed at the edge of the circle is considerable when related to the speed at the center so if we bolted something onto the center it probably wouldn't work the fact that we put it on the edge means that we get that leverage advantage that we would be missing if we put it on the center and that's why i don't think bolting the motor onto the center of this would be particularly good but as i said when we were looking at the exercise bank we looked at putting things on the rim as opposed to putting things on the center i mean there are more technical challenges or rather different technical challenges in arranging things at the rim of a sphere of a circle than there is at the center of a circle but we took that on board and we arranged it on the rim and that's the thing that i'm really fascinated by now not not so much this i think this is awesome that this group would be go to work to any degree at all but i'm really fascinated by that idea of high speed low talk and at the circumference of something rather than at the center now there has been a move from that idea of things at the center needing high torque to axial flux generators where you have a flat plate that flat plate begins at the center and goes out to the edge and this i think is a slightly different arrangement but we don't look at the plate at all we're only looking at things that are happening on the circumference so that circumference seems to be quite a good way for um harvesting energy particularly when you have a low torque application so i'm quite fascinated by that as an idea and i'm probably going to be looking into that and more of those low talk applications because you know there's quite a lot of that kicking around there isn't that much around where we get a high torque we need fairly strong winds and then massive turbine blades when we're looking at stuff like that something like this then there's a lot more of that around that could be scavenged and harvested and i liked that idea that that seemed to be um verified or is borne out by this set of experiments i mean if you're looking at something where it's a complete thing and you just want to turn that into a generator the answer is yes you can do it and actually it does quite well even in the lightest of breezes as long as you go along the circumference of it anyway i hope you enjoyed the video series and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 30,694

Rating: 4.9463086 out of 5

Keywords: wind, power, generator, rotating, roof, ventilator, robert, fwg, murray-smith, energy, renewable, green, design, disruptive, alternative, technology, diy, d-i-y, how to, make, build, home, built, made, science, fair, project

Id: YYvH09AnxD4

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020