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Forum Index : Windmills : marine wind generators
| Author | Message | ||||
| Linc Newbie  Joined: 17/01/2008 Location: AustraliaPosts: 3 |
looking for a small wind gennie for my livaboard yacht. anyone got any ideas. |
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| KiwiJohn Guru  Joined: 01/12/2005 Location: New ZealandPosts: 691 |
Lots of things to consider Linc. How much power do you need? Is the boat swinging to a mooring or tied in a marina? Do you want to make something or are you looking for recommendations for commercial units? |
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| Linc Newbie Joined: 17/01/2008 Location: AustraliaPosts: 3 |
Thanks KiwiJohn. i have been thinking of making on but work is too demanding. have 3@80W and a 40W solar panel and the regulator has burnt out. have been looking at air-x 400w marine wind turbines but at over $1000 i thought i would ask around first to see if those in the know could shed some light on the subject. am currently in dry stand so its the perfect opportunity to get this sorted out. Lincoln |
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| KiwiJohn Guru Joined: 01/12/2005 Location: New ZealandPosts: 691 |
Hi Lincoln I have heard that one of the best generators to use on a boat system is an old main-frame computer tape drive motor. These are something in the region of 48 volts and very well made though with a lot of aluminium I dont know how well they would last on a boat. A lot of the people on this site use the Fisher & Paykel washing machine motor which would be great for your boat except for a few less than desirable characteristics, they are (or can be) noisy, the iron stator is not well protected from the weather and of course they are not very compact. As a first step I would suggest seeing what you can find in the way of permanent magnet low voltage DC motors, prefereably of the fully enclosed type. John |
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Tinker Guru Joined: 07/11/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1904 |
That's interesting John. I too have a sail boat and am tinkering with a suitable wind generator to augment the solar panels at night (at anchor). I do have 3 old motors that came out of an old 1" video machine, these run on AC with a capacitor but do not have permanent magnets AFAIK (have not yet taken them apart). When you say computer tape drives, do you mean the old punched hole tapes? If so, that would go back to the seventies and I doubt there would be many still around. Also, in those days the rare earth magnets were not really out of the labs yet, I think. What I done so far re the boat wind gen is building 2 versions of axial flux neo magnet types, both were rather poorly performing due the largeish (~6mm) air gap required for the coils and the limited number of turns available when trying to fit the lot inside a 125mm alu tube for compactness. My latest idea is to build a small version of the F&P idea. I sourced 8 very strong rod magnets from an 8 channel paper chart recorder, these will spin inside a 10 coil stator. I'm trying to make the iron part from the 32 mm wide building tie bands that are available at hardware stores and come in long coils. Cutting short sections of this for the coil laminations and placed inside a ring of layered tie band should do the trick. To insulate the iron laminations (its just galvanised) packing tape for the ring part and paint for the short coil laminations might work. The lot would be cast in epoxy in a suitable former to make a solid stator . Even the coils can be held together with epoxy resin since making bobbins is not easy unless one can salvage suitable ones. Anyway, that's my plan for the boat wind generator. A F&P stator with the new magnet rotor makes a great learning tool BTW, might even mount it on a pole at home if I get around to make blades for it. Klaus Klaus |
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| KiwiJohn Guru Joined: 01/12/2005 Location: New ZealandPosts: 691 |
Tinker, the tape drives used to stand in rows with big 15" reels of magnetic tape flicking back and forth searching for the required data. They were rather impressive machines and you are right they are from the '70s era. http://www.piercefuller.com/library/img00089.jpg They were built to run reliably from a very slow speed right up to several hundred RPM. A typical one would be about 3 to 4 inches in diameter and 6 to 8" long. They are still around (in fact two are snoozing in my garage cupboard right now). One has been used on a sail boat mounted on the pushpit and driven by a length of fencing wire with a spinner in the water, good for cruising but not much use in the marina!  |
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