Wind Turbine Rotor From An Old Tumble Dryer

[Music] hi so in my journey to work this morning i came across essence it looks like an indecent tumble dryer and like all of these things of course what the first thing we've got to do is get into it and get those bits out and it's always the same approach basically if you see a screw unscrew it if it's got a special attachment drill it out or try to find the special screw attachment and that's what we're going to do with this we're basically just going to unscrew it and see what bits we've got inside so once you get it to pieces this is basically what it looks like it's a big old drum sitting on a plastic bottom with uh essentially a motor driver to drive this rubber belt and the fan out the back there's a heating element and it basically just blows hot air across these things while it tumbles so we've got the pretty case off now all we need to do is remove these bits and that's a bit easy actually you just slide it out okay so here's the bottom chassis which is just a basically a big old lump of abs and these machines are essentially really simple i mean there's a motor here doing all the work and it's got an impeller here sucks in the air blows it over the heater blows that over your clothes well the same motor turns that big old drum we saw and it does at a certain temperature for a certain time that's about it really not even the heat is that complicated here it is it's just a roll of heating wire on there and a bit of mica there's a couple of thermal sensors so they're stunningly not very complicated devices anyway that's the bottom chassis which is mostly a big lumber plastic what we want out of it really is the mode of the capacitor with the impeller so let's pull that to pieces okay so here is the motor with its impeller removed from that case i also removed the sump pump incidentally because i don't if you remember we made this thing and we made this thing from one of these so i'm gonna have a look in that and see what's in there that could be interesting this is a shaded pole motor which is no surprise if you think about it because of course it's a very low torque application driving some hot air over a rotating drum anyway let's get that motor to pieces okay and that's the inside of a shaded pole motor so what we've got here is the main coil and the shedding coil and here's the rotor itself with its little aluminium bits there for the induction field couple of nice bearings and the end caps are just these pressed bits of steel i mean the whole thing is surprisingly cheaply made actually i mean the thing about these obviously is they run for absolutely ages like i said they are load talk so that's all very interesting but what we've really got is of course this this is a large steel drum beautifully balanced with a central pivot point right here so you've got to think to yourself haven't you would this make a rotor would this make a wind turbine now i don't really know so what we're going to do is cut some slices down here to make the blades and then bend them to make a rotor okay so i took my drum and i marked down a load of lines using a sharpie an angle just putting the angle on there and drawing the sharpie down and now what we're going to do is cut down all those lines an angle grinder okay when you cut out all those straight lines what you need to do is put a little t cut in across those lines so you're making like a t-shirt top and bottom about a third of the way across and again about a third of the way across leaving a third attached then all you do is bend them out and the first one's hard to do but after that it gets a bit easier actually and you just get yourself in there and give them a bend they're a bit stiff then whack them with a hammer of course and all you do is go around there bending those out to shape now it's supposed to be 36 degrees to the tangent but when you look at the different rotors all over the place there is a bit of variety there okay so i don't think it's that crucial what that angle is but if you bend it out so it looks more or less like a rotor you're probably going to be more or less okay the easiest way i've found of doing this is to get some of these and get your grips in there and just force it round they will tear the metal a little bit but hey hope i have to admit i just judge these by eye bend them out to the angle you want so when you've done that this is what you end up with now these edges are a bit sharp so do remember to go over them with a file otherwise you won't get a few hours not a bad idea now and we're pretty much done here actually obviously what you need to do is give it something to rotate on i'm going to give you a close-up of that because it takes a little bit of explanation about how to set that up now we're going to use ordinary skater bearings because they're so accessible they're just all over the place so dirt cheap and they're easy to get hold of now you'll notice there's an outer metal ring an inner metal ring and then inside of those is a whole load of ball bearings each of those rings is a little groove in them so the ball bearings can sit there now what you can do with something like this is if you make sure something only rests on that little in a metal ring then it will continue to turn if this rests on the outer metal ring now this is what they do in those um whirly birds that you see sitting on roofs because this will work just fine as long as it's not too much weight on it so we're talking a few kilograms or so but those whirly birds i'm just way a few kilograms or so so it's just not a standard way but it is a way of doing this to explain what i mean i've got one here this piece of bar 12 millimeters it's been turned down to eight millimeters and then there's a cone at the end here so the eight millimeter goes through the center the cone rests on that inner ring now if i rest the entire whirlybird or in this case my rotor only on that outer ring then it will be free to turn and it will turn freely with all of the weight taken on the ball bearings in between now that's not a brilliant way of doing it if you can add a hundred kilos or so but given the weight of the whirlybird it actually works just fine if you bother to take one of those whirlybirds apart you'll see that this is pretty much the standard way of doing it so all we have to do is treat a disc with a 22 millimeter diameter hole in it so that will fit in there in the head of the whirlybird we need to drill a hole that is slightly bigger than that outer ring there so that this won't rest on the plate only that rests on the blade so 12 millimeters will be fine which will take it to there then we can rest the whirly bird on there and fasten it to the larger ring that we made right i'll get on with that and then show you it so that's it in place now the outer edge of the bearing is resting on the plastic and the inner edge of the bearing is resting on the center pole and there's the center pole which is a bit of steel going right the way through to the bottom bearing and the bottom bearings just held in the center by stays i mean you could use another ring a larger ring if you want i just happen to have stays so i put stairs in there and there it is finished now um we have had storm bella and stone baller is gone so it's really quiet at the moment so i'm going to turn a hairdryer in on it in a moment we can watch it spin now a hairdryer doesn't give a lot so that's that's certainly for sure and it'd be better if we got it outside but we know these designs will spin in the wind really i mean it's very little more than a whirly gig but let's put a hairdryer on it anyway that really is quite awesome hey and you can see how little resistance there is by how long it's spinning after i've taken the hairdryer off now obviously what we'd do is put the magnets on the bottom here with the coils underneath it but i thought i would do something on how to make a rotor because i saw that tumble dryer and i thought that's just an awesome thing obviously it'd be better we put little fins uh little airfalls on here and all we did was bend them out but still getting a good result from that and it would be good to get that in some real wind anyway i hope you enjoyed the video and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 18,821

Rating: 4.9585061 out of 5

Keywords: upcycle, recycle, reuse, repurpose, wind, turbine, rotor, generator, diy, energy, generation, generating, robert, fwg, upcycling, recycling, power, engineering, stem, steam, off grid, science, fair, project, how to, make, build, home, made, built, green, alternative, disruptive, design, technology, dt, renewable, industrial, arts, shop

Id: 4OltRIXvONY

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020