This year we had 22 students and 8 staff .
We built a couple of 8 foot machines (as above) and a new 12 foot
design
(below).
Evening speakers included Bill Beaty the Science
hobbyist guru
and the Dans from Wondermagnet
in
Colorado
The staff.. Brian Faley, Hugh
Piggott,
Ian Woofenden, Andy Gladish, BJ Daniels, Michael McGuinness, Dan
Bartmann
and Dan Fink
One of last year's machines at Win
Anderson's Store on the island. This is an eight
foot
(2.4 metre) diameter machine with a tail shaped as a map of the island.
We took it down (80' tilt-up tower) on the first day to have a look and
do some basic maintenance, (not that it really seemed to need
it).
This was a good introduction to the project for those who had not seen
this stuff before. This machine had produced 250kWh since records
started on 1st December - about 2kWh per day.
I tried to fit in a brief theory session after lunch most days.
This year we had no wind on the last day. We erected both
machines
on short guyed towers but neither of them did much.
We put the 8 foot machine on Ian's dumptruck and did some testing up
and down the road. Not very scientific but interesting and lots
of
fun.
The big machine was a little too large to fit under
the
power lines along the road so we didn't get any truck testing done with
that. However, we did mount the alternator on the back axle of
Doug's
truck and drove it pretty hard, putting about 2 kW of continuous
power into charging the batteries of Ian's little electric vehicle, the
Skog.
Here Brian is wiring it up watched by Ian and Andy. Dan Bartmann
in foreground. We could not run it for long because without
cooling
it soon got very hot. Brian looked worried. It was his
machine
to take home and play with at the end. Up in the wind, it'll do
fine,
but next to a truck exhaust was not an ideal place to run hard.
Brian is a local electronic engineer with his own consultancy
business and he plans to creat a controller for this alternator so
it can run at variable voltage. Low voltage is best for low
windspeeds
and higher voltage will work with better efficeincy in stronger winds
when
the rpm is higher.
Later we put it up on a pole and got cut-in voltage out of it in next
to no wind, but it never seemed to be worth fetching any batteries for
it.
