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I swear I've learned more about motors, electricity, and engineering from watching a handful of your videos than from reading numerous books and an elective college course on audio electronics. You have a way of really simplifying things to their first principles so it's easy to grasp the core principles.
Thank you, I am most certainly a beginner and this video has really helped me get a sense of where to get started. I really appreciate the level of detail, cheers.
Robert Sir, thank you for taking the extra time to explain this aspect of the wind turbine to folks like me who often gets hung up on these things that I assume your buddies would chalk up as common knowledge. I'm trying to power a lifestyle off grid and I purchased the neptune 4 and trying to figure out which one of these babies I should make.. I get very motivated to learn about these things after I see the excitement your displaying when testing these various wind catchers. As you know your laugh has everyone wanting more and for me its because of how genuine it is. Thanks for taking the time to do this video for us less educated backyard scientists. You have inspired me to want to learn more. For that, my friend, I am very GRATEFUL! 🙏🏻
I wish I had found your channel sooner! Such a wealth of information! I'm trying to design a device/structure (it's crazy and impossible for now) to capture energy and your information is helping the gears in my head turn 😆
I've ran lattice boom cranes most of my life. You would think it wouldn't catch much wind. I learned to think of wind like water. The wind hitting the tubes of my boom would push but also the drag it had on the wind that was close would also have an effect. Just my observation Rob. Cheers.
That calculator is pretty useful. It gives you a good sense of how wind and blade length contribute to power. So if you're in a low wind area you'll either need a large fan, or a way to speed up the wind like the Darwin design
I might not always have the background for understanding the specifics of some of your video’s instructions, but I ALWAYS come away knowing more than I did before I watched one of your videos. Thank you.
These theory and many of the build and demo videos are almost always inspirational to get me thinking of implications and variations of design, controllable variables, and various configurations. For example, the online calculators in relation to the dual blade design from a few videos back. I haven't checked the online calculators yet, and I will later, but based on experience in the past, these quick calculators often are not complex of sophisticated enough to account for the more complex computations resulting from air vortex interactions. I seriously doubt any of the free tools would be able to help me simulate various (jet)turbine(ish) designs, let alone dynamic designs that respond to various inputs. The calculators handle the relatively 2D calculations at a single time slice, but you probably can't analyze 3D interactions over time, much less see a graph and quickly spot the highs, lows, unexpected spikes (up or down) which might indicate very fine tuning optimizations, etc. 30% seems like a very low efficiency. Just that dual blade design, seems to spin the two blades faster, each blade more than twice as fast. Was the torque more than halved between them? Or was the torque increased a bit? The same wind, could it have been 35-40%, maybe 50-60% capture? Probably not that high, but intuitively, it seemed like an inordinate amount of energy capture, just by the visual cue of the rapid rate of increase of the fan blades on startup from dead stop, and a great increase in maximum speed. But as I hinted, this did not indicate the torque, although the power (voltage) generated seemed to be somewhat proportionally increased. Intuition is a great tool but not always accurate. That's why we have math. :-)
no they are not but they are a good guide and certainly tell you the available energy which tells you immediately if someone is talking BS or not. The betz limit is a good description of why the overall efficiency is around 30% normally - bear in mind solar cells are around 15% efficiency and combustion engines are around 37%
I think one of the other constraints worth thinking about early on is whether there is an acceptable noise level limit - how much louder than the wind itself can be tolerated? If someone wants to use the thing at times and in places where the aditional noise might annoy people - then they may want to go for a system with less gearing, and potentially a larger + slower blade configuration if possible. That will also inform motor choice. For example, I think the generation closer to the rim idea might be one to think about if a quieter operation is desirable. I think this one could be quite a binding constraint if you want to use it in residential areas for example. I think it's a matter of understanding all the different constraints, size, portability, weight, noise level, cost. Then working through the aspects of the system - as they'll all trade off against one another, but will be more or less binding in different circumstances. Inevitably though whichever system is first planned, it will be worth doing a prototype, then adjusting a few things to understand the tradeoffs better. Sort of like you've done in several thousands of videos. Though i think people need to do it themselves in their circumstances and iterate the building blocks from those videos to meet their needs.
Keep it simple and enjoy build process, mistakes will happen, friends and family will think your mad, but once your project is completed and working, you’ll get a real buzz/ sense of achievement, I know I did.
I think an interesting experiment would be to use a kite or parachute to lift some kind of gravity battery. Maybe if I ever get free time I'll try it. Love your videos. They always have me day dreaming during work. Thank you for the awesome content
Robert, Thank you for explaining how a wind turbines work and introducing us to the calculators on line. My question - when building a generator is it the distance from the center to the mag/coils or the amount of magnets/coils that dictate the generators RPM. Or both? Also same question, does it have any affect on voltage or power. The fictitious generator would have the same amount of raps of copper wire. FYI - thank to you I have built 3 generators with different amount of coils and size magnets. Unfortunately I haven’t built a turbine yet due to the lack of knowledge, but not anymore with this video! Big thanks for all the great work you do!
I love your videos. Been watching for years. Im not a real fan of wind. It has its specific uses but Ive been more interested in universal power manifesting like with Gravity Batteries. If Yellowstone blew up and americans are running for their lives something like a gravity battery may be more useful. Or in situations like if WW111 broke out and people are hiding in caves they could still use Gravity to power stuff.
2watts is very low. Almost same size: "Silentwind starts charging with only 4kn wind, generating 50W at 14kn and 100W at 19kn. As maximum it generates 420W (Generators 12V) at 29kn." 4.5m/s is about 9 knots, so guessing thats about 20W. However, they cost over €2100.
Hi Robert and students, If you were to collapse the blades to 30, 45, 60 degrees from the shaft, flipped the blades, thick side out. Would that increase of decrease the efficiency of the turbine? Great channel, great work. Thank you.
Robert, I just noticed a rather gaping hole in our curriculum. Specifically, Braking Systems for when we ARE blessed with that proverbial hurricane. Would you mind learning about Dynamic Braking Systems, so you could teach us? Thank you. I am old, and my brain gets weaker. Still, it beats the option, yes?
Robert i think your focus is wrong. Take a look at the Tesup Hepa windmill for homes. It is said to have a nominel output of 7kwh. I know it will never hit that on average, but it tell me that YOU should try focus on vertical windmills, and where your focus today is how to build the blades, try focus on how to generate as much power as possible when your mill is spinning. You have seen examples of the Liberty Engine, maybe you could try letting a rotating magnetfield inside a set of four to eight microwave coils, to make induction energy.
I see you have a axial flux motor rotor and you don't need it that big. Motor efficiency really matters and a wind turbine spinning much faster than the one you got there is more efficient. I have made various turbines in the past and its better to have one for low wind and another for high wind instead of having one that covers from low to high winds. You can try using a ebike motor controller that has regenerative breaking it will use power to get the turbine to speed and then use regenerative breaking to charge the battery.
How does the double propeller design from video 2023 impact the power output? Would we get twice the power at the same wind speed? I was wondering if you have made any more measurements.
Good morning Robert, Gary here from the UK, I'm sorry for going off subject BUT I have a question about inverters and transformers so if you use a transformer that changes 240v to 12v and added an inverter that goes from 12v to 240v to run appliances what would you pay for on your electric bill ,would it be 12v per hour ????. I asked this because I can't see them lowering the standing charges any time soon in the future, thank you for your help
By transformer I assume you mean an AC-DC converter (a transformer just changes AC to AC, usually but not always stepping up or down the voltage). You will always be paying more for your electricity than if you just plugged your appliances straight into your domestic electricity supply because there will always be losses. AC-to-DC converters will lose a bunch of power as heat in the transformer and buck regulator, and then using an inverter will induce losses the other way. Remember, you're paying by the Watt (well, Watt-hour, but we'll skip that for now), which is voltage x current. So if your computer uses 120W, then it doesn't matter (from a bill-paying point of view) whether that's 12V at 10A, or 240V at 0.5A, you'll still be paying for 120W. If you put an AC-DC-AC converter in between that's say 75% efficient, you'll be using 120W but paying for 160W!
Looking at planning laws and how difficult it is to erect anything over a certain height and conservation laws, yet numerous companies have gigantic wind turbines appear sporadically across the country, a small building with a 200foot high structure next to it, surely numerous smaller turbines could be used instead, and wouldn't be so ostentatious?
I wonder if you can ionize the air for a wind MHD? Maybe a darwin wind catcher, a cold cathode made of an alloy made containing radium or something like that in the MHD with some powerful neodymium magnets.
@@dexterdequoitdikkentheworl87 Only at high altitude so maybe stronger magnets and or a grounded cathode. If you took advantage of charges in the atmosphere where voltage increased by altitude maybe.
Need city planners to design pathways to funnel air ....🤓....and using traffic air displament at overpasses...already known about...but it's not on the agendas...
