Build a Homemade Wind Generator
Posted by Laird on May 19, 2008
Build a Homemade Wind Generator
Here at the Living Off the Grid homestead we like challenges. Our challenge here was to build a Homemade Wind Generator that satisfied the following criteria for design, and teach you how to build it efficiently while having fun too.
My wife Jane, our 12 year old son Andre’ and myself all took part in the challenge, and we have, after many months of work come up with a design that meets All of the above criterion. With our 15 years of experience living off the Grid with renewable energy we have seen many different wind generator designs. We think these plans are the very best plans available on the ‘net’, when cost, ease of assembly, and the short time frame to achieve the desired results are all considered.
Your Homemade Wind Generator can be built for under $100 usd and will produce 1000 watts of power
You will find FREE wind towers and batteries!
You will find FREE wind generator blades- built in an hour!
You will build your own FREE Battery Desulfator
The plans are easy to read and follow
You will match your generator motor to your blades
This is an Original design for the homemade wind generator
-Must be made from readily available material
Must be easy to build and assemble
Tough enough to endure the tough Canadian climate
Your home made wind generator will look good!
Protect your new wind generator from damaging high winds with a simple tilt-up or pilot vane system
And we make this promise to you: these plans do meet the preceding requirements, but it does take some work on your part. You bought these plans because you presumably didn’t want to spend over $2500 for a wind generator. These plans offer many solutions to the challenge above, use your own imagination too.
Click here to get started
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Domestic Wind Power
Posted by Laird on May 19, 2008
Domestic Wind Power
Wind power is taking off in a big way worldwide, in both giant utility-scale installations and small-scale turbines intended to power a single home. Remote off-grid dwellers are finding wind power an excellent supplement to solar during cloudy weather, and enjoying the extra freedom that more power input gives, especially after dark or during cloudy weather. On-grid folks are installing home wind turbines to offset rising power costs, and even selling extra power back to the utility.
Wind has been the world’s fastest growing renewable energy source for the last seven years, and this trend is expected to continue with falling costs of wind energy and the urgent international need to tackle CO2 emissions to prevent climate change.Wind power has come of age. It is now actually cheaper to generate electricity from the wind that it is from coal or nuclear fuelled power stations, and advances in technology are pulling the expanding wind industry into direct cost competition with gas. Wind energy already supplies 17,000MW worldwide - enough electricity for more than 10million households. Capacity is expected to grow by 25per cent per annum over the next few years.
Grid-connected power
Grid-connected wind turbines may use grid energy storage, displacing purchased energy with local production when available. Off-grid system users either adapt to intermittent power or use batteries, photovoltaic or diesel systems to supplement the wind turbine.
Small wind generation systems with capacities of 100 kW or less are usually used to power homes, farms, and small businesses. Isolated communities that otherwise rely on diesel generators may use wind turbines to displace diesel fuel consumption. Individuals purchase these systems to reduce or eliminate their electricity bills, or simply to generate their own clean power.
Wind turbines have been used for household electricity generation in conjunction with battery storage over many decades in remote areas. Increasingly, U.S. consumers are choosing to purchase grid-connected turbines in the 1 to 10 kilowatt range to power their whole homes. Household generator units of more than 1 kW are now functioning in several countries, and in every state in the U.S.
In urban locations, where it is difficult to obtain predictable or large amounts of wind energy, smaller systems may still be used to run low power equipment. Equipment such as parking meters or wireless internet gateways may be powered by a wind turbine that charges a small battery, replacing the need for a connection to the power grid.
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Sonoluminescence! is this the Future?
Posted by Laird on May 14, 2008
History
The effect was first discovered at the University of Cologne in 1934 as a result of work on sonar. H. Frenzel and H. Schultes put an ultrasound transducer in a tank of photographic developer fluid. They hoped to speed up the development process. Instead, they noticed tiny dots on the film after developing, and realized that the bubbles in the fluid were emitting light with the ultrasound turned on. It was too difficult to analyze the effect in early experiments because of the complex environment of a large number of short-lived bubbles. (This experiment is also ascribed to N. Marinesco and J.J. Trillat in 1933 which also credits them with independent discovery). This phenomenon is now referred to as multi-bubble sonoluminescence (MBSL).
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More than 50 years later, in 1989, a major advancement in research was introduced by Felipe Gaitan and Lawrence Crum, who were able to produce single bubble sonoluminescence (SBSL). In SBSL, a single bubble, trapped in an acoustic standing wave, emits a pulse of light with each compression of the bubble within the standing wave. This technique allowed a more systematic study of the phenomenon, because it isolated the complex effects into one stable, predictable bubble. It was realized that the temperature inside the bubble was hot enough to melt steel. Interest in sonoluminescence was renewed when an inner temperature of such a bubble well above one million kelvins was postulated. This temperature is thus far not conclusively proven, though recent experiments conducted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign deduced the temperature at about 20,000 kelvin. Research has also been carried out by Dr. Klaus Fritsch of John Carroll University, University Heights, OH.
Properties
Sonoluminescence can occur when a sound wave of sufficient intensity induces a gaseous cavity within a liquid to quickly collapse. This cavity may take the form of a pre-existing bubble, or may be generated through a process known as cavitation. Sonoluminescence in the laboratory can be made to be stable, so that a single bubble will expand and collapse over and over again in a periodic fashion, emitting a burst of light each time it collapses. For this to occur, a standing acoustic wave is set up within a liquid, and the bubble will sit at a pressure anti-node of the standing wave. The frequencies of resonance depend on the shape and size of the container in which the bubble is contained.
Some facts about sonoluminescence:
The light flashes from the bubbles are extremely short - between 35 and a few hundred picoseconds long, with peak intensities of the order of 1-10 mW.
The bubbles are very small when they emit the light - about 1 micrometre in diameter depending on the ambient fluid (e.g. water) and the gas content of the bubble (e.g. atmospheric air).
Single-bubble sonoluminescence pulses can have very stable periods and positions. In fact, the frequency of light flashes can be more stable than the rated frequency stability of the oscillator making the sound waves driving them. However, the stability analysis of the bubble show that the bubble itself undergoes significant geometric instabilities, due to, for example, the Bjerknes forces and Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities.
The addition of a small amount of noble gas (such as helium, argon, or xenon) to the gas in the bubble increases the intensity of the emitted light.
The wavelength of emitted light is very short; the spectrum can reach into the ultraviolet. Light of shorter wavelength has higher energy, and the measured spectrum of emitted light seems to indicate a temperature in the bubble of at least 20,000 kelvin, up to a possible temperature in excess of one megakelvin. The veracity of these estimates is hindered by the fact that water, for example, absorbs nearly all wavelengths below 200 nm. This has led to differing estimates on the temperatures in the bubble, since they are extrapolated from the emission spectra taken during collapse, or estimated using a modified Rayleigh-Plesset equation (see below). Some estimates put the inside of the bubble at one gigakelvin. These estimates are based on models which cannot be verified at present, and may include too many unsupported assumptions.
Temperatures this high make the study of sonoluminescence especially interesting for the possibility that it might produce a method for achieving thermonuclear fusion. If the bubble is hot enough, and the pressure in it is high enough, fusion reactions like those that occur in the Sun and other stars could be produced within these tiny bubbles. This possibility is sometimes referred to as bubble fusion.
On January 27, 2006, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute claimed to have produced fusion reactions by sonoluminescence, without an external neutron source, according to a paper published in Physical Review Letters.[1][2] To date, these results have not been reproduced by other members of the scientific community.
Recent experiments (2002, 2005) of R. P. Taleyarkhan, et.al., using deuterated acetone, show measurements of tritium and neutron output consistent with fusion, but these measurements have not been reproduced outside of the Taleyarkhan lab and remain controversial. Brian Naranjo of the University of California, Los Angeles, has recently completed an analysis of the Taleyarkhan results claiming that Taleyarkhan had most likely misinterpreted the radioactive decay of standard lab materials for the byproducts of nuclear fusion.
Writing in Nature, chemists David J. Flannigan and Kenneth S. Suslick study argon bubbles in sulfuric acid and show that ionized oxygen O2+, sulfur monoxide, and atomic argon populating high-energy excited states are present implying that the bubble has a hot plasma core. They point out that the ionization and excitation energy of dioxygenyl cation is 18 electronvolts, and thus cannot be formed thermally; they suggested it was produced by high-energy electron impact from the hot opaque plasma at the center of the bubble.
BUILD YOUR OWN SONOLUMINESCENCE GENERATOR
Solar Power is Free energy from the Sun!
Posted by Laird on May 14, 2008
Introduction
How it works.
We’ve used the Sun for drying clothes and food for thousands of
years, but only recently have we been able to use it for generating power.
The Sun is 150 million kilometers away, and amazingly powerful.
Just the tiny fraction of the Sun’s energy that hits the Earth
(around a hundredth of a millionth of a percent) is enough to meet
all our power needs many times over.
In fact, every minute, enough energy arrives at the Earth to meet
our demands for a whole year - if only we could harness it properly.
How it works
There are three main ways that we use the Sun’s energy:-
1
Solar Cells (really called “photovoltaic” or “photoelectric” cells)
that convert light directly into electricity.
In a sunny climate, you can get enough power to run a 100W light
bulb from just one square meter of solar panel.
This was originally developed in order to provide electricity for satellites,
but these days many of us own calculators powered solar cells.
2
Solar water heating, where heat from the Sun is used to heat water
in glass panels on your roof.
This means you don’t need to use so much gas or electricity to heat
your water at home.
Water is pumped through pipes in the panel.
The pipes are painted black, so they get hot when the Sun shines on
them.
This helps out your central heating system, and cuts your fuel
bills. However, in the areas of the world that chill in winter months, you must remember to drain the water out
to stop the panels freezing.
Solar heating is worthwhile in places like California and Australia,
where you get lots of sunshine.
Mind you, as technology improves the use of the ‘drain-back’ system which
avoids problems with freezing in cold conditions, will allow that more northern countries
to at least use these solar systems for 9 months of the year.
3
Solar Furnaces use a huge array of mirrors to concentrate the Sun’s
energy into a small space and produce very high temperatures.
There’s one at Odellio, in France, used for scientific experiments.
It can achieve temperatures up to 33,000 degrees Celsius.
Solar cells provide the energy to run satellites that orbit the
Earth. These give us satellite TV, telephones, navigation, weather
forecasting, the internet and all manner of other facilities
In California, the Solar One power station uses the Sun’s heat to
make steam, and drive a generator to make electricity. The station
looks a little like the Odellio solar furnace , except that the
mirrors are arranged in -circles around the “power tower”.
As the Sun moves across the sky, the mirrors turn to keep the rays
focused on the tower, where oil is heated to 3,000 degress Celsius, The
heat from the oil is used to generate steam, which then drives a turbine,
which in turn drives a generator capable of providing 10kW of electrical
power.
Solar One was very expensive to build, but as fossil fuels run out and
become more expensive, solar power stations may become a better option.
Energex (Australian power company): Animation of how a solar cell works at
www.energex.com.au/switched_on/activities/photovolatic/photovoltaic.html
One idea that is being considered is to build solar towers.
The idea is very simple - you build a big greenhouse, which is
warmed by the Sun. In the middle of the greenhouse you put a very
tall tower. The hot air from the greenhouse will rise up this tower,
fast - and can drive turbines along the way. This could generate
significant amounts of power, especially in countries where there is
a lot of sunshine and a lot of room, such as Australia.
See a video of this at
http://www.enviromission.com.au/project/video/video.htm
See also: www.fuelfromthesun.com
Advantages
Solar energy is free - it needs no fuel and produces no waste or pollution.
In sunny countries, solar power can be used where there is no easy way
to get electricity to a remote place.
Handy for low-power uses such as solar powered garden lights and battery & chargers.
Disadvantages
Doesn’t work at night. Very expensive to build solar power stations.
Solar cells cost a great deal compared to the amount of electricity
they’ll produce in their lifetime.Can be unreliable unless you’re in a very sunny climate.
In the United Kingdom, solar power isn’t much use except for low-power applications,
as you need a very large area of solar panels to get a decent amount of power.
Is it renewable?
Solar power is renewable. The Sun will keep on shining anyway, so it makes
sense to use it.
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