A wind powered car!

Well, sort of !

Oztule's a active member of thebackshed's forum, and has come up with a few crazy idea's, something to do with living on an island maybe. After building his windmill with timber blades made with a chainsaw, he's found a good use for all that free electricity. The following was copied from his message postings on the forum.

In Oztules words.....

Posted: 07 December 2008

Well the chainsaw mill has driven a variety of loads lately in order for me to learn what it can do, and how it behaves.

It has driven 12v, 24v, 30v, 36v, 42v, 48v,....80v battery loads, and it behaves very differently on all the different loads. It has directly driven resistive loads (with simple switching), and a hot water service with a 240v element using a 2.5kw home brew square wave inverter

I have fashioned a 12v coffee heater into a hot water element and driven that from a 275A 1204 curtis controller, and 4ohm resistive coils (microwave primaries) in a "bucket" of water. (and saw over 5KW) I had also made a grid tie "inverter"from a DC motor and ac induction motor....single and three phase. (three phase works better).

I was running out of things to play with.... and then at the tip, I saw a very very sad Suzuki swift. It had been cut down and used as a shooters vehicle, with no bonnet, no rear bodywork, crushed roof, no drivers door, smashed windows and windscreen, and totalled motor.... this was just the thing...... an Electric Vehicle to play with (soon to be).

So it was out with what was left of the motor, find a tyre for the front and then a quick conversion.

It looks like this I'm afraid....

I quickly made up an adapter plate, and made a coupling out of the two sprockets with dual chains to connect them face to face. This would be the universal coupling, and bolted it into the gearbox housing. The plate was cut from the hull of an old ship. (waste not want not). I grabbed the 4kw motor I had used for the grid tie experiment... note the chain adapter/coupling:

and plonked it in like so.

The electronics were wired into the car... perhaps wired is too strong a word, thrown into the car describes it better, and became housed in the glovebox. The 1204 controller I blew up when testing the 12v water heater,( a poor battery connection let the voltage rise to high for a split second, and blew some of the fets and other bit ans pieces.... not like Trevs though,) but with judicious use of hot glue, it is back together again. The careful wiring job looks like this:

The batteries were tossed in behind the seat, wired up and we have an EV (forgive me Trev for even using the same name). Here we see the batteries and the input line from the mill to charge them up. The seat was missing before I dragged it home. The roof was caved in but by carefully panel beating it (sat in the seat and pushed it back up), it will keep the sun off anyway.

The mill does fairly poorly charging at 36v, so 20 amps is about all it will get up to, but at that rate it fills up pretty quickly.

Soon it was up to 42v,and it was time to go for a howl.

I was scooting along at about 20km/h flat out. The speedo still works, as does the odometer. She has about 4electric Km clocked up so far. I have perhaps 20km of tracks through the forest on my place to play with, so there's plenty of room to play with this thing.

So now I have free car, free batteries, 500 dollar mill, and need no petrol to run around the farm now.

So that was the days work today. I pulled the motor out a few days ago.

Still having fun with this thing

12th December 2008

it's been renamed the Chook Mobile. Strange thing is everyone who has seen it hooked up to the windmill, then taken it for a drive loves it...... which is pretty strange as it looks like a pile of the proverbial. No accounting for taste over here apparently. (we must have a very low expectations.

It does run well, and only takes a short time to recover on the mill from a 4km trip round the paddocks. The mill seems to charge at 10-20 amps in most winds since it was built.

I managed to get it into third gear, and she does near 35km/hr. would do 40 on the bitumen I reckon easily.

She now done nearly 30km of paddock bashing so far... no oil, water or petrol. I have taken the position of assistant sh*t kicker in OM inc... somehow it suits me.

So move over you other moguls, were coming through with the wind car.

10th January 2009

Update:
The little car has done over a hundred miles now, and hasn't had a spanner put on it. I know a hundred miles doesn't sound far, but over the paddocks (fields) it is a fair chore for any car.

Total cost of running so far is $0.00. so thats good motoring. Average speeds are probably 6mph (looking for weeds with with a backpack sprayer).

It can do 35 kph to come back from the farthest parts of the farm on the "roads" in third gear.

As a guide, the Suzuki 4x4, gets about 9lt/100km on the road which is about 9lts/hour. However at paddock speed, it seems to use about 3-4lts/hour. (couple of hours spotlighting seems to use 1/5 tank (about 40lt tank))

so 160km/6= about 26 hrs of paddock bashing... times about 3.5lt/hr=91 litres of fuel saved... which here is about $180.00

Not a bad hobby car really.. so maybe up to $200/month savings... at that rate, batteries are economical when these ones die. ($2400/year)......cool

The mill has no trouble keeping it topped up at that rate. It seems to only need a few hour of wind to pull up the necessary amp/minutes, and still spends most of it's time shut down.

Another month or two, and the mill will have paid for itself... amazing

You can read the full forum thread here.....

http://www.thebackshed.com/Windmill/FORUM1/forum_posts.asp?TID=1429&PN=1&TPN=1