Wind power!!!

As mentioned in earlier post, our another renewable source will be from wind.

To let you know, according to BBC, UK is one of the best places (top in Europe) in the world for wind power. Although, still not comparable to the other hydrocarbon sources, it contributed around 11% of the total electricity generated in 2015. The future certainly looks bright for this cheapest source of electricity.

At start, I had the DC generator that converts the rotation of the shaft into a DC power supply. The speed of the rotation is proportional to the angular speed of the shaft. The propeller which is connected to shaft is itself rotated because of the wind energy (well, hair dryer in our case)

Therefore, initially I bought 3 different types of propeller:

         Propeller 3 Blade 210mm
         Propeller 3 Blade 125mm

          Propellor 5 Blade 60mm

After testing all those blades, I found that the 60mm blades can generate the maximum voltage. This is because it has the least weight means more rotation which in turn means more voltage (EMF). Using 2.2KW hairdryer the voltage generated was around 7volts. The voltage generated from other blades were lower as the length increases.

Although, 60 mm blades would generate the voltage in the region we wanted, we figured that it would not be as visibly demonstrative, the idea of wind turbine.

The other idea we tried was to use gear system, which meant we could get large voltage with small angular speed.

More of this in the next post.