Homemade wind farm — a wind turbine for generating electricity

Have you tried harnessing the wind to make it work for you? After all, wind energy is one of the cheapest and most easily accessible! It is not proposed to build windmills, as it was done in the old days, or a complex modern wind turbine. But every family living in rural areas, or any summer resident, will be able to build a wind turbine to generate electricity, even if it is small, low-power.

The energy generated by the wind turbine is enough to turn on the pump for watering the garden or garden to light up the house.

The principle of operation of the wind turbine is based on a scheme known in ancient times with a self-rotating drum. The device consists of two halves of a hollow cylinder, which, after cutting it, moved apart from the common axis. The resulting body had a pronounced aerodynamic asymmetry. The air flow running across its axis seemed to slide off the convex side of one half-cylinder. But the other, facing the wind with a kind of pocket, provided significant resistance. The drum was turning, the half-cylinders were changing places faster and faster, and the spinner was thus rapidly unwinding.

The principle of operation of the wind turbine

Such a scheme compares favorably with a wind turbine with a propeller turntable. Firstly, it does not require great precision in the manufacture and gives a wide choice of materials used. Secondly, it is compact.

Judge for yourself. The power of the generator, driven by a drum with a diameter of only about a meter, will be the same as when using a three-bladed propeller with a diameter of 2.5 m! And if the propeller turntable needs to be installed on a high rod or on the roof of a house (this is required by safety regulations), then the turntable-drum can be placed directly on the ground, under a canopy. The drum also has a number of other advantages: a large torque at low speeds (which means that you can either do without a gearbox at all, or use the simplest single-stage one), the absence of a brush current-removing mechanism.

Homemade wind turbine for generating electricity

So, let's start with making a drum. The blades can be made of plywood, roofing iron, duralumin sheet or sheet plastic of suitable sizes. In any case, try to avoid using excessively thick blanks — the rotor should be light. This will reduce the friction in the bearings, which means that the drum will be easier to unwind by the wind.

Wind turbine design

1 — resistor; 2 — generator stator winding; 3 — generator rotor; 4 — voltage regulator; 5 — reverse current relay; 6 — ammeter; 7 — battery; 8 — fuse; 9 — switch.

If you use roofing iron, strengthen the vertical edges of the blades by placing a metal rod with a diameter of 5-6 mm under the flanging. If you decide to make the parts of the turntable from plywood (its thickness should be 5-6 mm), do not forget to soak the blanks with hot drying oil. The cheeks of the drum can be made of wood, plastic or light metal. When assembling the drum, do not forget to smear the joints with thick oil paint.

The crosspieces connecting the individual blades to the rotor are better welded or riveted from steel strips with a cross section of 5x60 mm. Wood can also be used: the thickness of the workpiece is at least 25 mm, the width is 80 mm. The axis for the turntable is easiest to make from a two-meter length of steel pipe with an outer diameter of about 30 mm. Before selecting the workpiece for the axis, find two ball bearings, preferably new ones. By agreeing on the dimensions of the pipe and bearings, you will save yourself from unnecessary work on fitting the pipe to the inner bearing clips. The steel crosspieces of the rotor are welded to the axis, the wooden ones are fixed with epoxy glue and steel pins with a diameter of 5-6 mm, passing simultaneously through each crosspiece and pipe. Mount the blades on the M12 bolts. Carefully check the distances from the blades to the axis: they should be the same — 140-150 mm. After assembling the drum, cover the joints of the parts again with thick oil paint.

The main element of the installation is ready, it remains to make the frame by welding or riveting it from a metal corner (a wooden version is also suitable). Install ball bearings on the finished bed. Make sure that there is no misalignment, otherwise the rotor will not be able to rotate easily. Cover all parts of the installation twice with oil paint, fix a set of pulleys of various diameters at the lower end of the axis. Connect the belt thrown over the turntable pulley to an electric current generator, for example, an automobile one (alternatively, you can try using a wiper motor).

The constructed sample of a wind power plant at a wind speed of 9-10 m/s will be able to provide power transmitted to the generator equal to 800 watts. But what if the weather is windless or the wind is too weak to provide the necessary electricity? There will be no interruptions in electricity generation if you use an energy storage battery. There is wind — let the electricity directly to the consumer, there is no wind - turn on the charged ones from wind turbines batteries. The figure shows the schematic arrangement of the electrical circuit of such a wind turbine.

The option of accumulating electricity and obtaining an alternating voltage of 220V is possible. To do this, you can use an electronic «stuffing» from a computer uninterruptible power supply (UPS), as a rule, the battery usually fails first, so used UPS can always be bought for symbolic money.

If the windmill is to be used for watering a vegetable garden or garden, it must be mounted directly above the water source.

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