First I would like to say that this is my first wind turbine blade that I had designed and completely built with the help of my good friend Tom

Tom is the owner of Renagade Composites.

A professional shop that produces parts for aircraft. So only with his help I was able to do this project.

Thanks Tom

http://www.renagadecomposites.com

 

My first thought on building a blade for my wind generator was I wanted to keep the design simple, so I wanted a cup style of blade. Now I had seen somewhere on the net that people were using PVC pipe to make blades with. I thought this was a good idea except that PVC is very heavy and brittle when it is cold so I want to make it out of a different material that would not be affected by the cold like PVC. So after shooting the bull with Tom one day he suggested to make it from Carbon Fiber and Fiber Glass so this is what we came up with.

First we started with a 9″ steel tube

Then we laid it up with Glass and foam

after the first layer set up we pulled it off the mold and drew our blade on it and cut it out.

insert a piece of steel to reinforce the hub

now this time we used carbon fiber on the next layers

then vacuum bag it

after it has been removed from the mold

then it was cut out and one more layer of glass to finish it off

Balance the blade

 

So now the 2 blade turbine has been installed onto the 47 ft tower and it performed better than I expected. I will be getting some solid info on the performance.

Diameter of this blade is 54.25 inches and weighs 22 oz. It has an start up speed of 3 to 5 mph wind speed.

In about 15 mph wind it would produce 15.5 vdc at 6 amps that is 93 watts of power from a ametek 50 motor. Big improvement from the other set of blades although this set of blades has a larger diameter and it has some noise not much but I expect it to get louder with higher winds. I think it will still be neighborhood friendly.

 

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