Darrieus VAWT - Wendel/S by swb

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Old water bottles are a huge environmental problem in several areas of the world. Those bottles are made of PET and are therefore not biodegradable. The good news are, that PET is (relatively) easy to recycle. Against this background, I designed a vertical axis windturbine (VAWT) for my master thesis. The requirements for this turbine are:
printable with a "standard" Desktop-3D-printer (in this case a MakerBot 5gen)
all parts necessary should be available in developing countries
cheap
easy to repair
enough power to charge a Smartphone
The turbine has three helical blades with an DU-06-W-200 profile, developed by the Delft University (1). Each blade consists of five elements and a top and bottom cover. To save material the parts are created hollow and are stiffened with struts and rips. The parts are connected by notches, lips and a wire rope (I used bowden cables from bikes) . A bike dynamo is used as a electrical power generator. The benefits of using bicycle equipment is the low price and availability at almost every point of the planet. As a shaft I used a threaded rod (M16). The problem with threaded rods is to find a straight one, but it is easy to develope a prototype with it.
To measure the rotational speed (which is proportional to the power output) I set up a Raspberry Pi with a hall sensor.
More information will follow soon. These will contain:
power/wind measurements
more information about the blade parameter
building instructions
a parts list
more picture/videos
maybe the complete thesis (in German...)
1)http://lr.home.tudelft.nl/fileadmin/Faculteit/LR/Organisatie/Afdelingen_en_Leerstoelen/Afdeling_AEWE/Aerodynamics/Contributor_Area/Secretary/M._Sc._theses/doc/2006_1_17.pdf