Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Update

[Faroun] sent in his updated vertical wind turbine. After running his previous one for a while, he felt that the motor he was using was inadequate, it required too high of RPM to produce what he wanted. He didn’t want to gear it up, fearing that the light construction couldn’t sustain rotation.

He built a new version that has the same surface area of fins, but much higher RPM. The new one, dubbed V8 is made mainly from PVC and an Amatek DC motor. His goal was to produce 100 watts at 35km/h. He doesn’t really state whether or not he achieved it though.

14 thoughts on “Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Update

  1. This is great, I agree, keep these kinds of articles coming !

    Those ametek motors are great for beginners wind projects. (Not that this is a beginner project)

    I did a small solar power install, blogged about it in the url when you click my name ..

    Thanks Hackaday !

  2. 100 watts at 35km/h (21mph) is not very efficient power production. It is hard to find average wind speeds over 14mph. At 14mph this “100” watt machine would only produce 34.3 watts. And 14mph is a hard wind site to find at ground level. 5mph winds would result in a mere 1.3 watts of power. This machine would take forever to simply payback the amount of energy it took to build.

    but cheers to trying.

  3. I like the idea of people looking into decentralized power. There is a theory I came across in science fiction that attributes the down fall of civilization to centralization. If we all count on one thing, say a power grid, what happens when that one thing goes down? Chaos?

  4. This is pretty cool. It would be interesting to see if any kind of airfoil can be made from PVC or a similar material; then a Darrieus design could be made. Savonius rotors are designed to primarily use only drag forces, so they can only spin as fast as the wind is blowing. Darrieus rotors primarily use lift forces, like HAWTs, and can spin much faster than the wind speed. So, yeah, just some food for thought!

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