Wind Energy
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Turbine design. |
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The wind turbine in the process of construction. |
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Siting the turbine will not be easy with trees in the way! |
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A sevonius concept model built from drink cans. |
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The wind turbine showing test motors rigged to the rear. |
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A turbine design based on commercial food tins. |
Video of turbine. |
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Wind turbine currently erected at the front of the house. |
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Carl,working on a new wind pump sail design. |
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26 November 2016 |
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Turbines in development |
Muppet Labs Update
We wanted to get a measure of the turbine performance so over the last few weeks we have been running monitoring software on the wind turbine to record the output during the week.
We have computed the minimum, maximum and average output for each hour during the period we were measuring. The graph shows how the output varies for a period of three weeks. The equipment uses and analogue to digital converter calibrated to show a peak reading of 255 for an input of 20V. There are peaks in output exceeding 20Vduring the Christmas period when we experienced heavy winds.
We have also been experimenting with a new kind of electrochemical cell which is based on the osmotic potential between two different salt solutions. Metal ions from a concentrated solution migrate across a paper membrane to a less concentrated solution generating an electric current. The concentrated solution could be made by evaporating liquid using the heat from a solar concentrator, which would provide a new way of exploiting solar energy. The results of the first experiment only generated a very small voltage but it was enough to demonstrate the effect. We are investigating ways to improve the performance. For anyone who wants to learn more the video clip which inspired this experiment can be found at :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfvmAom8ZnA
Another demo of the same idea using
copper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVXnCFt_XHM
Orange wind turbine Maplin wind turbine