Thread: Hawts and Vawts
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Old 11-08-10, 07:55 AM   #24
Big Al
Big Al
 
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Scotland
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Patrick , things are moving. I should now have 30+ days of windlogging data and will post details of this asap so we know what sort of wind regime I have. meanwhile I've been reading sites and booke to get up to speed on whats necessary. I don't know what the etiquette is between various wind sites but have been reading a lot of the backshed.com posts and posting with my big mouth there quite a bit ( this site was down ).

Result of this so far I have 3 possibilities depending partly on what my wind logger throws up

1 The unexciting route is to build (I hope competently ) a good hawt > this route would practically guarantee the o/p I'm looking for but may give me planning problems , and neither myself or the neighbours would be aesthetically as pleased as with a Vawt. That matters to me.This route does n't sound very exciting and won't add anything to anyones experience and knowledge. Cleverer folk than I have done it all before and its too easy.I am also anti hawt for I think a good reason-I don't like maintenance. Spin a bicycle wheel held in both hands by the spindle/axle at say a low speed 10 rpm. and feel what it does when you try to change the plane of rotation. hawts have to do this all the while especially in the average domestic wind regime ,and altho they can be designed to stand this stress you are better off without it. The excellent Danish wind power site on big wind (excellent except" like the oil lobby" it only admits to hawts existing ) if read between the lines is paranoid about bearings. I'm not surprised-- they ought to be. This week I went to the UK Renewables conference and exhibition in Glasgow. What's in the really big Hawt nacelles is mind blowing in the sense its all unnecessary and very, very expensive . And have you read some of the blade replacement figures for big Hawts ? Anyone think replacing a blade on a 150m tower is cheap or safe ?

2. Slightly more exciting is to aim for the same o/p from a fairly standard Vawt, helically bladed and with sufficient solidity to be self starting . I think this may be possible but is difficult and may take a better man than me. However this is my fallback route.

3. The exciting route , having read up the Peter Allan Sharp and Bayly-Kentfield patents is a revolutionary state of the art Vawt . This is potentially a long route with much experimentation and maybe disappointment at the end. My opinion is that if I was n't 67 this would be the route to go and given time I don't think would end in disappointment , but I am 67.

4. I have a couple of revolutionary (maybe ) ideas of my own regarding Vawt design. Before shouting my mouth off , over the next 2-3 months I want to model these and see if I think they are possible. I also have a couple of revolutionary ideas (maybe ) on energy storage for home builders but again I would like a bit more time before deciding on these.

Route 3 has thrown a spanner in the works in that I have been watching for a while progress on the Cranfield college Vawt. I have a highish regard for Cranfield. This has now surfaced as Aerogenerator X and involves Arup, Windpower , and Rolls Royce and a lot of other high power names. If you google Aerogenerator X I'll think you'll find enough data there which if its half true (I believe it--- they've wind tunnel tested a 15KW version and if Cranfield are good at one thing its aeronautics-I don't see Rolls royce, Arup and some of the other names involved failing to exercise due diligence ) will consign Big Hawts to one of technology's dead ends. Just imagine an Aerogenerator X at 20MW with another 10MW unit concentrically inside it and maybe even more inside that . At 3 rpm the blade replacement guys should be out of business and if a say 30MW unit is possible (again at 3 rpm these things on land could be interwoven which kills Hawt o/p but can enhance vawt o/P if done cleverly ( "drafting" ) and you could MAYBE envisage several GW windfarms on 1% of the land required for Hawt windfarms without the fleets of large trucks, cranes and repair bills and without the Hawt associated environmental concerns. I would n't see this happening before 2025 but it could end up being the way we go. Then we'd really be getting green. ( I don't know , as a new boy , how green this site is but we need renewables IMHO and we also need nuclear -this is a no-brainer-interesting channel 4 evening of programs this week on "what the greens got wrong " .At the moment with Hawts getting bigger and bigger the cost per KW hour paradoxically goes up and up. Its getting like the oil lobby situation.

To come down to earth one things for sure, mine's going to be a vawt. If my progress seems slow that's OK by me. I always have several projects ongoing ( at the moment I' m renovating a Fritz-Werner H-V mill , two engraving machines and a tool and cutter grinder. On top of that my Grandkids generate a lot of projects for them. I'm also trying to mend a shaper for a lady in Poland (by email) and get a new telescope into commission.

The Vawt by the way is supposed to be just part of a larger project (before it took over my life !! ) for a heatpump system using my garden as a heat source and I'll be using A.C.Hackers excellent thread and work on this site for that.

(groan) However did I find time to go to work for a living !! By the way I have been following avidly the vawts discussion--its a site with very open minds IMO.

Edit addition. One of the things that came out of the Glasgow trip was an input from the Proven guys who make one of the best Hawts in my opinion and who did n't have an axe to grind as they were n't involved in Zeeland, is that the Zeeland tests were crap. I always suspected something very fishy in those figures. The Proven engineer made a point in saying it very loud in front of the Skystream stand who were next door . He did n't get any takers.

Every Day is a Schoolday.

Rgds. Big Al

Last edited by Big Al; 11-08-10 at 06:07 PM..
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