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Wind Turbine Project

This isn't very fancy but I thought I might as well post it for interest. This was made on a boring sunday afternoon whilst I was thinking about how to improve my tesla coil! Not very related hey! (scatter brain)

The blade spindle is just from an old car fan that I had laying around with some aluminium blade extensions bolted on. Why aluminium blades? it looked good :-)

The blade shaft is a piece of steel 8mm rod ground down to fit the blade spindle motor shaft hole. The rod is supported by two bearings which I fitted into two aluminium bars on either side of the pipe. They are just bolted together so they clamp the support pipe. The directional fin (allows it to turn in the breeze) is just another piece of aluminium sheet (1mm) bolted to the support pipe. Another pipe fits into the support pipe to enable the whole unit to spin.

Pics:

(click to enlarge)

In practise the turbine needed very little breeze to make it turn. Although with the generator fitted it would probably take a little more effort.

The generator is a 12V drill motor that has had it's gearbox removed. It spins fairly easily. The gear ratio here is about 3:2. In a fair breeze it provides only about 2v! Only just enough to charge 1 AA battery. My inention was to have the 9v knight rider light powered from this turbine as a night display on the roof of our shed. But without some kind of power invertor or better motor, I can't see how this would work.

I will write a bit more about this when I figure out how to get a decent voltage/current from the turbine.