3D Printed Wind Turbine Has All The Features, Just Smaller | Hackaday

2023-01-13 01:14:33 By : Mr. Rick Huang

For anyone with even the slightest bit of engineering interest, wind turbines are hard to resist. Everything about them is just so awesome, in the literal sense of the word — the size of the blades, the height of the towers, the mechanical guts that keep them pointed into the wind. And as if one turbine isn’t enough, consider the engineering implications of planting a couple of hundred of these giants in a field and getting them to operate as a unit. Simply amazing.

Unfortunately, the thing that makes wind turbines so cool — their enormity — can make them difficult to wrap your head around. To fix that, [3DprintedLife] built a working miniature wind turbine that goes a bit beyond most designs of a similar size. The big difference here is variable pitch blades, a feature the big turbines rely on to keep their output maximized over a broad range of wind conditions. The mechanism here is clever — the base of each blade rides in a bearing and has a small cap head screw that rides in a hole in a triangular swash block in the center of the hub. A small gear motor and lead screw move the block back and forth along the hub’s axis, which changes the collective pitch of the blades. Wind Turbine Battery

3D Printed Wind Turbine Has All The Features, Just Smaller | Hackaday

Other details of full-sized wind turbines are replicated here too, like the powered nacelle rotation and the full suite of wind speed and direction sensors. The generator is a NEMA 17 stepper; the output is a bit too anemic to actually power the turbine’s controller, but that could be fixed with gearing changes. Still, all the controls worked as planned, and there’s room for improvement, so we’ll score this a win overall.

Looking for a little more on full-size wind turbines? You’re in luck — our own [Bryan Cockfield] shared his insights into how wind farm engineers deal with ice and cold.

Not so ‘literally awesome’ if it dont work :(

Yeah kind of a joke to consider a wind turbine that consumes more energy to point itself into the wind, than it could ever hope to generate, a win. By definition that’s a literal loss. An interesting exercise for sure, but a failure in the one metric that really counts for energy generation.

also not “all the features” if you consider actually generating any power as a feature. but none of those diy wind turbines on hackaday every do generate any usable power.

Wave and Tide generators if next to the ocean are far more efficient and not so detrimental

relax, you are on par with nuclear fusion ;-)

Smart bit of thinking on the wind turbine, how soon before we can buy a kit online?

Have the wind speed power things up to save power.

Snow covered solar panels would be better.

Negativity has is rarely bad for progress as it spurs inventive brains to higher levels of ingenuity. If I was the driver behind this concept I would be thankful for all the deadbrain comments above.

Is there a reason why these kind of wind turbines are more common that the vertical kind? With a vertical kind, you wouldn’t have to worry about rotating it to face the wind.

They can be quiet as well.

https://youtu.be/VnSZ0MHIcvs

In that video he keeps saying “it has no moving parts”… |You keep using that phrase; I do not think it means what you think it means|

It’s amazing. You made a gorgeous team engineering alone! Your humor is clever, not loud. It was just pure fun to listen to your video. :) I definitely want version 2! (I don’t understand comments here, all bitter, they don’t get the potentials.)

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3D Printed Wind Turbine Has All The Features, Just Smaller | Hackaday

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