How To Make A Self--Feathering Windmill (Self Regulating Turbine)
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- čas přidán 4. 04. 2024
- Traditional windmills are wonderful things and I'd like one please : - ) For heating water, pumping, grinding, sawing, drilling - even generating electricity - but how to stop them spinning too quickly? Over running and exploding? Hmmm...
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Came for the train stay for the project
Like every video, subscribe, and maybe buy some plans. Tim is an amazingly intelligent and creative human.
Jep
Given that no one was hurt, I loved your story of disaster. I would enjoy watching this project if you decide to take it further.
you already know its a good day when way out west uploads
I always liked the idea of a wind powered sewing machine. I make tent canvases, they could be made and then be destroyed by wind.
My good lord you are a clever chap Tim.
Having a direct acting, mechanical safety mechanism is an excellent idea Tim.
Hi Tim! I bet you have a ton of ideas for inventions. Ideas don't get you very far unless you can actually carry them out. And that is where you shine! Imagine if you lived in Leonard's time? We'd be speaking your name for centuries!
you could use it as an alternative power source for the giant wheel, as that would act as a giant mechanical battery.
PLEASE more from the Windmill... in future Videos 👍🙂🖖 Greatings from Belgium ⬛🟨🟥
Love seeing these types of videos of folk experimenting with novel ideas.
Tim, now this is one of my areas of experience, having experimented for years, even building a 20ft Creatan sail windmill with a fantail gearing to keep it into the wind. The more blades the greater the torque but also the greater the self regulating effect. Off set wind shafts from the main yaw pivot and a hinged tail work well for regulation as long as the spring anchor points allow for plenty of tail movement with a small change in spring length. It's all in my book, cheers
Thanks Andy. If I ever decide to build a big one, I'll do some more research but for now I just wanted to test the principle..
@@wayoutwest-workshopstuff6299 Tim, I would also say that each blade only need to pivot to a maximum of 15 degrees for them to spill the wind. So 45 degrees will cause the speed hysteresis, cheers
Now, I need to preface this by pointing out that my experience is in mountaintop and arctic environments - cold, remote, miserable. But it has been my experience that the cheaper wind generators primarily exist to put money into maintenance budgets, as opposed to generating usable power. I believe your passive physics-based approach is going to be lovely at overcoming that tendency, and it only helps that you aren't on a remote Alaskan mountaintop. (though they are generally quite nice to visit!)
A beautiful example of what should be one of the guiding ideas behind designs KISS! (Keep It Simple Stupid)
A great proof of concept! ....... and a good video to boot!
Glad you liked it!
With all the wind that is around these days generating power with something like this would be handy combined with a solar setup. Safe travels. Ken.
I love the Idea Of windmills!!! We live on a bit of a plateau & seasonal winds come some months out of the year & I have always toyed with the idea of mounting a wind powered air compressor on the roof over the garage to charge an air tank down below... What inspired me was a vidio I watched several years back titled: Air powered bike w/first prototype "Little" motor. The fellow makes a double acting 2 cylinder powered air bike running off a scuba tank. The motor is chained to the pedals & if you don't watch out it could whack you in the leg! I would improve on this Idea by useing 2 smaller carbon fiber tanks mounted on either side of the bike toward the rear vs the large goofy one, AND the bike would be a Schwinn world tourist model. I believe it was made from 1978 to 79 but was not as popular as a conventional bike & shortly discontinued thereafter... This bike has the freewheel ratchet mechanism in the front sprocket assembly between the pedal crank to the sprocket, so the gearsets may be shifted when coasting as well as pedaling. Normally if you tried to shift speeds when coasting & not pedaling, the chain would jam & it would be a rather unplesent expierience. If this bike is used, the pedal cranks could be freewheeling while the air motor is powering the bike. A wind powered bicycle... I wondered if anyone else had made a wind powered air compressor & yes indeed. When I went serching, I found another very interesting vidio titled: AMISH air POWER ~ OFF GRID. He runs the whole workshop on windmill powered compressed AIR! 😲😁✌👍
The freewheel in the bottom bracket was invented by a kiwi who built at the time one of the lightest microlites, I can't remember his name but do remember him telling me about Schwinn buying his patent
It’s something new and fascinating every week with you.
2:30 I’ve lived around that kind of windmill my entire life, and the mechanism in it does not work the way you are thinking. The tail fin is connected to a mechanism that rotates in out of line with the fan fins. This causes the windmill to turn sideways to the wind, thus slowing it down. There is a mechanism inside that triggers this above a certain speed. There also is a cable that hooks to this system, that runs down the tower to a large lever mounted to one of the legs, and pulling this lever down and latching it activates the mechanism, turning the tail, and causing the blades to turn sideways to the wind. This is used to ‘shut off’ the windmill, and releasing it lets the tail swing back in line with the fan, and the windmill turns into the wind again.
The only time the tower must be climbed is if something breaks, or oil needs to be added to the gearbox.
Additionally, it should be pointed out that these aermotor windmills were designed specifically to pump water wells, so the gearbox in the top converts the rotary motion into a linear up and down action, like a piston, and would be connected by a rod to a pump down a well. If you search
aermotorwindmill and find their website it even has complete parts diagrams and explanations of how they work.
They likely don’t translate to what you are doing, but are quite interesting mechanisms!
My grandfather had a business repairing and maintaining the windmills. As a teenager, I climbed many towers to work on those greasy gearboxes. I loved those old things, but I must admit that I hate the giant wind powered generators that infest the countryside. The theory is good , but the reality is terrible. Just ask anyone living close to the wind farms.
@@johnalexander4356 They put in a giant wind farm in my area, and you can hear the hateful things 5 miles away, and see them from 30 miles away, especially at night when the hundreds of blinking red lights turn on. I feel sorry for anyone who lives close enough to hear them all the time, it would drive me insane. It’s bad enough just spending a few hours near them.
@@johnalexander4356 Offshore wind ftw!
The elegant simplicity of the solution is downright genius! 👍😁😎
We've had bio char, railway lines and carriages, guitar playing devices, mechanical driven fly wheel chopping wood cutter , an air compressor type rail engine., wooden pedal car , and now a windmill, power generator.... remarkable ...... and he plays the drums like a god.... beyond comprehension your talents .. sir.. !!! Congradulations ...
Another project frought with danger. Fabulous! Please don't ever stop.
Your engineering creativity never ceases to impress me to the point of shaking my head in semi-disbelief.
☮
This is clever! Basically turning the blades themselves into the weights on an old-school ball governor like used on historical steam engines!
There´s a vertical wind turbine with similar design criteria (self regulating, easy to DIY and scales well) that solves this quite well,too.
The vertical vanes are hinged so that centrifugal force can fold them out horizontally if they´re spinning too fast, and to regulate the speed this happens at they´re pulling against a weight hanging inside the tower.
Tim the Tinkerer at it again. :)
Tim, I'm working on a wind-powered composter and I'm very excited that you've posted this video! I'm using a vertical axis turbine from salvaged squirrel cage blower parts but much design work is still required. I'm looking forward to seeing what applications you use this for and what problems you might run into and solve for along the way.
Great new project! Looking forward to follow this. I am no big believer in feeding a whole country with wind power, but for a local home or farm must be perfect.
I really like the idea of staggering the spring tensions, I think you would get vibration issues on anything larger and faster. but for smaller turbines its a fantastically simple idea. You could try a variable spring that slowly increases stiffness as it extends so the change happens more slowly rather than the sudden stop start you got with the current springs. probably expensive or difficult to make, but maybe someone has a clever ay of making them
Variable springs are probably the way to go, that’s also my thinking. Just makes the power output more constant I suppose.
The staggered spring tension induced vibration could be mitigated a bit by pairing opposite vanes.
Variable spring, or non-linear curve channel. Either might be easier to create, though a spring's probably easier to iterate and tune.
Since he was using 2 springs on each vane, he could use two different springs. With one stiffer than the other, it would at least be a 2 stage set up if variable springs are too expensive/hard to find.
Genius mechanism. I love your building capabilities with recycled scrap.
Charge the pedal car with it.
Marty T built a hydro-electric generator from a washing machine a few years ago, and because the water is always running, you don't need to mess with batteries.
Lubricating the sliding motion might help with the jerkiness, it sounds once they start moving out the jerk out all the way, some grease might allow them to move more smoothly and just go part way
The water pumping mills.
You do not climb the tower to move the tail.
Generally there is a spring that pulls the tail over so the blades are out of the wind, and a rope down to the ground that you pull to straighten out the tail and let it start pumping.
Well that's clever as can be! I think you could make your spring almost as strong as you would ever want your wings to be pulled and that would automatically give you whatever speed makes that max force. Maybe you would want to limit the speed of this design to be fairly slow because there's a risk of strong vibrations if one wing gets stuck outward (though that wing being sidewards would slow the rest down wouldn't it!). Very clever design overall. It would be great to see it put to use. If you don't like batteries you could try other mass energy storage like pumping water up a hill.
Thanks, Ben. Yes, I'd set it for 'slow and steady'. I have to build it first though!
I remember taking a physics class about windmills. I dont remember much, but i remember that 3 or 4 blades is optimal. Otherwise, the airstreams behind the blades interfere with each other, causing a loss of power.
I think perhaps your memory is playing tricks on you? More blades *are* better -- but the additional energy capture benefit diminishes greatly with each blade. In wind turbine design the saying is that "three blades is a very good approximation of infinity blades; and even two blades is pretty good..."
@davidhaywood8029 No, you are not exactly right.
The turbulences that each blade leaves behind actually interferes with the next one, causing vibration and inefficient, so it really is like, the less, the better.
Also, an uneven number of blades is better if you want to avoid vibration, because if one blade moves in front of the "stem", the airflow gets slowed down by the "stem" , causing the blade to bend forward, transmitting the movement to the opposite blade and causing both to vibrate/bend
->material fatigue.
If there is an unequal number of blades, the movement gets transmitted to (in case of a three blade turbine) the "TWO" opposite blades, therefore splitting up the energy between the two (or really the three)
->less vibration/material fatigue.
The less blades the better +unequal number of blades= three blades!
There is a reason why commercial wind turbines have 3 blades.😉🤓
Greetings from Germany
Well I don't want to get into one of those internet thread debates. Yes, I'm aware of all of that. But what I was saying is that from a fundamental physics perspective the greatest energy capture (at a given turbine diameter) comes from the greatest number of blades -- the original comment appeared to be saying otherwise. Fatigue & manufacturing problems can be "engineered out" but at a cost. So the reason for commercial wind turbines having three blades is driven largely by economics, i.e. that you get little benefit in energy output from the cost of the extra blade(s). There were large two-bladed turbines (such as the WindFlow systems) but the cost of the teetering mechanism was more than the cost of having an extra blade. Maybe we're saying the same thing here, but I find it helpful to distinguish between fundamental physics, engineering detail, and economics.
@@davidhaywood8029 I get your point.
The more surface, the more wind gets "harvested," but all in all 3 blades are making the most sense.
Also Tim requires something that makes the most practical sense (and maybe looks cool too 🤔?).
Anyway I get your point, but too many blades REALLY create too much turbulence, MAKING THEM LESS EFFICIENT.
If they didn't, I would definitely agree. 💯
*Edit: Talking about the energy harvest.
This is a great idea, however if you try this with large and heavy blades, you may get problems with vibrations if the opposing blades don't move simultaneously outwards.
2 suggestions.
a vertical axis wind turbine where the blades bend themselves out and the lower hub rises up the faster it spins. sort of like a gravitational governor on a steam engine.
a turbine like you have already but with segmented blades, and springs on those segments, rather than the blade shaft.
Thats kind of the way youve gone already, but spread over the 4 blades, but it seems to me that would be unstable.
Simplicity of the design is beautiful. Well done! Cheers J
Very clever indeed. I have a suggestion, tough. I think you should synchronize the linear motion of all blades together with cables or links. Leaving them to move independently will result in imbalance, which is for a larger windmill disastrous.
To solve your problem with gradual braking, you could experiment with different slot curves.
"Nearly killed the horses"
Nothing about nearly killing yourself, we know where you did in the priority list now 😂😂
Excellently clever design idea.
This is brilliant!
My first thought was to install a heavier spring by default and use weights on the blade side to 'adjust' the feathering action as required... centrifugal force on the weights will eventually overcome the spring.
You might have to fiddle with the weights for awhile but once it's set, it's set.
This is an absolutely wonderful practical demonstration of a negative feedback system. I’m wondering if those gas lift drawer closer things would work well to act as dampeners.
Have you tried Hugh Piggott's self furling design. Its the most elegant design. An off center turbine mount, a slanted tail mount. And the most reliable, consistent, durable and available spring of all : gravity. His book Wind Power Workshop is a treasure chest of practical knowledge.
Usually they have a tail that turns it away from the wind when the wind gets too strong. Kris Harbour Natural building has several very good videos on building his windmill. Plus soooooo much more interesting stuff you'd like Tim, but I'm sure you'd never find the time for that.
In Holland we had cars, DAF 46 for example, that had a gearbox working with this principle. It might be a good addition for the future. Maybe only as a extra break on the shaft. If you go for 25 ft 😂😂😂😂to be honest I can’t wait for you to start working on the air powered train again 😅 cheers
You don't have to climb the tower to turn the fin on the back of the western US windmills. There is a wire that goes up to the fin. It is attached to a lever that can be pulled on the ground. My dad had one.
Ah-ha! Thanks. The ones here are way behind..
@@wayoutwest-workshopstuff6299The small wind pumps that we have here in Canterbury, New Zealand (& plenty of other places) *don't ever* need to be reset. The shaft from the turbine head is on a slight angle from vertical, so that gravity furls the blades back into the (steady) wind after a gust. This avoids the need for springs (and the complexity of spring mechanisms, and their associated problems, etc.). It's one of the most elegant engineering designs I've seen in my 30-odd years as an engineer... EDIT: Google search term for this (& similar) designs is: wind turbine offset tail furling
Hi Tim, a couple of comments from a control engineer. The type of control you're making here is "proportional" - that is the blade pitch is changed proportionally with the rotational speed. This will always have a "steady-state" error - in laymans terms it will still spin faster in strong wind than it does in light wind. That may well be fine for your application.
The somewhat juttery control response is because the control system is actually quite unstable in your case due to the nature of centrifugal force and static friction. Centrifugal force is proportional to radius, so once the blade starts to pull out against the spring, the centrifugal force just increases and it will feather all the way. It will never be stable in the middle ground. (You overcame this by setting all the blades to different spring tensions - clever!). This is exacerbated by the static friction in your sliding mechanism. The rotor will accelerate until its turning too fast and overcomes the static friction and suddenly slides all the way out. Then it will slow down all the way until the spring can overcome the static friction again and then it will slide all the way in.
Essentially, it will ping-pong between two fast and two slow and there's not much you can do about it!
Thanks for this, Daniel. You're right, of course, but I have been thinking a lot about the mechanism and I think I can make some improvements - perhaps it will still work out smooth enough to be functional..
I love to see the clever solutions you come up with.
great weather to test it today
More train stuff plz
You might want to add a flywheel to make it a smoother shift yet. That way it can store a little bit of energy and keep it from speeding up and slowing down quite so much. Also some larger blades might help out some as well by being able to capture a little more energy from the wind, though I'm unsure if this is a good idea or not.
Tim you are a genius, what a great idea. I do wonder if putting a flywheel on it would make the "hunting" speed less of an issue.
do love a windmill. Bigger Tim bigger.
Having a vertical wind turbine would be beneficial.
maybe, but they don't look as good!
True
(Both of you)
Hmm maybe a flywheel to capture all that energy and even things out ? :-) most interesting!
one issue with building bigger version of this is the weight of the blades means you need much stronger springs.
I wonder if you could make a centrifugal governor. it can be placed closer to ground than the blades, and you can pull heat from the brake disc for whatever you might want to heat up.
also for energy storage, you could try building a thermal battery. simplest version is just gravel or sand with some system for moving hot air in and out. with this you won't have to worry about generators or regular batteries.
Furl! Furling! The turbine gets offset so when it gets pushed too hard it falls out of the wind while the rudder keeps it oriented.
Nice idea. What about using a centrifugal clutch as used for karting. You can change the springs to make it engage to higher or lower speeds. The shaft would be attached to the inner rotating part that has the weight and the outer bell would be fixed to the rig.
The main thing with wind powered machines is never disconnect from the load, cheers
I live in Denmark where there are a lot of wind, and where lot of modern wind turbine designs originates from. A lot of the early windmills, for instance the ones from Vestas, used a design similar to yours, but just had a small portion of the tips of the blades that tured. Our neighbour had a small windmill with 2 metre blades, and only abot 20 cm long tips that turned, that was enouh, as they are situated where the speed is the highest. There were no buit in dampener, but i suspect that the spring was of the type that gets stiffer as it is stretched. A simple system with a bolt thightening the spring was used and a weight, similar to the ones used for fishing, were used to calibrate the fin to turn at a defined pull, easily calculated from the desired max rotational speed in relation to wing radius and the weight of the tip is self (hope that alle makes sense)
Looking forward to follow along your build!
Thanks for this - so the tip rotates but doesn't move away from the rest of the blade? Is that right? Interesting!
Yes, that WAS interesting, clever guy.
your projects are always so unique...thank you.
What if you installed a speed regulator like on a music box? I'm thinking of two wheels with wings - I think a music box only has one ring with the wings on it. The question should be understood in such a way that I really have no idea whether it works. I just think that they would only get enough air resistance with enough speed and therefore wouldn't stop it right away.
Absolutely loved this. Very clever solution
Always up to something. Thank you Tim.
I think there needs to be some form of hysteresis such that the feathering action could only take effect slowly but the feathering would remove itself quicker than it could reapply itself.
brilliant as always, Tim. I was wondering, for fine-tuning the return rate of each vane equally could you use some kind of rotary mechanism? Difficult to explain in words, but i'm imagining something like a disc in the center, with attachment points for each spring (90* for 4, 60* for 6 etc.). By rotating the disc around the same pivot as the blades, you could shorten or elongate the springs all at the same time, keeping the ratio between them the same but allowing for higher/lower top speeds as required!
looking forward to seeing what you end up doing with this either way, perhaps it could be used for low power floodlights around the farm where you don't have to deal with the scary 240v of mains...
I'll have to play with that idea. Not today we're having 50-60mph wind gusts here in the mohave desert today again fir the 3rd day this week ! Great ideas you gave me though ! How much power are you wanting to generate at a time ? I've got great ideas about it ! Thanks for your ideas.. I didn't know that the fins could be so small. I've been playing with a vertical design myself.
Try a VAWT that would be suitable, there's a large variety of blades.
Clever as I've come to expect!
Tim, a suggestion for tweaking the spring tensions simultaneously and more accurately: don't attach the inner ends of the springs to the windmill arms. Instead fit small pulley sheaves to the spring ends. Fix further pulleys where each arm meets the hub. Pass a light cord , star-fashion, around all pulleys. Join the loose ends via a small turnbuckle. In this way, equal tension can be applied to all springs (assuming they are identical). Great project!
I am amazed how you think through these problems.
That is a great story about the self destruction wind will.
Frank
Keep yp the awesome work Tim! It looks so cool!!
Next you will have to release this design haha :D
Spin Doctor😊
As usual most interesting and ingenious , as far as governing the mill , isn’t that the load’s job ?
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing Tim 👍
hey heres a great idea as well. do you remember them spiny barn fents that were shaped like a ball? ( i still have one expect its a land ordainment right now, great for keeping the birds from the garden) well there were designs for something similar to those a while back to be used as wind turbines. that never happened. so instead of the drive part being horizontal, the drive part would be vertical. thats a thought any ways.
cool idea! Though I would think as the blades get bigger and heavier the force of gravity will interfere with your self feathering blades
You are a total legend!!!
Genius idea
The mechnism to control the stabilizer based on rpm & turn the windmill against the wind to reduce speed doesn't need to be reset, ever.
it is like a governor on a small engine, it might even be called a governor. idk, I was never a professional.
I worked my grandmothers, ~3meter diameter with ~40 blades. It was a well pump, and it always spun, but only pumped when engaged, so the governor was always working...wind & load.
She also had an electric generator with a wooden 2 blade, like a airplane, and it spun REALLY fast!!! It was also controlled by a similar governor, but tuned different. Again, the load varied, the wind changed, and the governor governed away.
the farm had no "city" power until the 1960s, no "city" water until the 1990s, and most of the land still doesn't have either.
These things worked for decades, but a tornado overspun them in 2003, despite the still functional governors.
I live on quite a windy site and am always thinking about wind power. Really interested to hear what the other ideas for the power are, other than electricity!
It is surprising in electrical applications how much braking effect putting the generator under a load causes.
This is so much like the sort of governor used on steam engines with the mass of the paddles replacing the mass of the balls. Ingenious.
I suspect that having the variable pitch paddles at the end of blades or as a comtrol surface at the end of the blades would have the same effect of acting as a brake.
Thanks Tim
Thanks for posting
Excellent experiment!
Use the same time tested system that steam engine uses. As the windmill blow faster the brake shoes clamp down harder. So even gusty winds the brake would be apply according. This all be done using car axle drum brake with a controllable brake pedal/ spinning governor.
Except the vanes will still face the wind so there would be a lot of resistance in a storm..
This is getting exciting 👍👍
Love all your videos thanks for sharing
Very nice
Thanks
Hope to see more of your windmill ideas soon thanks
Nice story :)
Great idea! I wonder how it'll perform under load. Probably need to adjust the springs fore some type of "typicall load" or what you might call it. Thanks!
One thing is though when you fit a generator it’s loading will be dependant up in how much energy output is required so you might be better using an electronic load dumping system like a heavy duty resistive load that will switch itself across the Genny output when the speed becomes excessive or have an auxiliary set of batteries to be charged such that you don’t waste the energy being produced in extra windy conditions.
Thanks! 👍💪✌
I want to see what you're planning with this home made windmill
I do hope storm Kathleen doesn’t do any harm
Very clever mechanism. I wonder though, would it function if you used something like a big rubber band to make a big ring connecting all the vanes to each other rather than springs on each of the individual vanes? My thought is to even out the tension on all of them so they operate more in unison and get a smoother rotation. That would also make it so you don't have to adjust each spring individually to calibrate it, just adjust the tension on the single band.
Thanks
You can also make the sails out of hinged louvers like venetian style blinds with a central axel centrifugal governor that controls the pitch of the louver blades.
Tim, what an elegant feathering solution! Like all the best ideas, deceptively simple which experience tells me are always the hardest to come up with.
Just love this channel: your narration, ideas and can-do outlook. Just fab, so thank you.
Very clever