Thursday, March 4, 2010

So herein lies the dilemma...

I my previous post I explained how the power in the wind has a cubic increase as velocity increases, but the power from the generator in linear. To illustrate how
these inter-relate look at the graph below.

The three linear lines represent the power output in different wind speeds for three different stator designs. The purple line is the cubic wind speed which climbs sharply as wind speed increases.
When the stator lines are above the wind power (purple) line it means that there is not enough power in the wind to turn the turbine.
If we look at stator 1. It starts producing power at 200 RPM, but at speeds of over 400 RPM is is not very efficient. The inefficiency is represented by the gap between the wind power line and the stator line (i.e. how much power is in the wind vs how much power is being produced).
Now looking at stator 3. It only starts producing power at around 450 RPM, but at 600 RPM it is producing 1kW while stator 1 was only producing around 200 watts.
What this shows is that unless you can adjust the makeup of the generator as the wind changes, you cannot make a stator that is efficient for all wind conditions.

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