3d printer wind turbine - design competition

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Jan 31, 2008
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A tantalising thing about VAWTs and HAWTs is that there are no comparative measurements of efficiency, it's not a very exact science.

It would be great to test a wide range of futuristic VAWT turbine blade designs, by printing the blades on a 3d printer, and running them through the same windtunnel tests attached to the same 3 phase generator.

can you believe that the price of printing a 12" metal windfoil with 0.04 mm accuracy is about $1.50 only?

It would be nice to have a kind of competition like the X-prize, where everyone sends in a number of propeller designs, pays for printing costs, and the most performant, and most pretty designs get a grand prize of $1 million! :)

so the cost of printing and testing 100 wind turbine prototypes to test them, would probably be about $500 for 12 inch high prototypes! And there could be variations of the current most performant ones, and radical new designs. It would be great!

Do you think, to compensate for the prototypes being small they should go through a high-pressure wind tunnel, or a tunnel that uses only CO2 or something? Which is heavier? should the most performant be measured by the volume they occupy?

it's something that a crazy person could certainly do with crowd sourced funding, and perhaps it could be an ongoing thing that year by year can continually advance the field of wind generators?
http://3d-printers.toptenreviews.com/
 
That's a very good idea. Computer processing has gotten much more economical recently too. Perhaps this in tandem with cloud simulation design would be an ideal mix.

Obtaining sponsorship would be the biggest obstacle to overcome rather than the technical aspect. You would have to set a goal for the winner to overcome certain efficiency/economics/longevity/durability thresholds.

Actually setting those targets might be harder than getting the money as you would need to have an intimate knowledge of wind turbines and how far it is possible to push the designs. Overshoot the goals and they will never be accomplished - undershoot them and the competition becomes meaningless.

By the way is that the inside of a tokamak?
 
there are websites now that allow people to put forward projects like films and inventions for pledges from web surfers, and it's amazing how much people managed to get from them!

I wonder what is the best way to measure the energy output of different designs, it's probably not with an actual electric generator, maybe it's better with some kind of physical resistance monitoring device. it would probably get a fair amount of contribution from different universities and schools, although someone is likely to say it's not feasible for one technical reason or another?

Nice website that is! :) yes it is the Joint European Torus fusion research centre that was next to my school. after many years of work, I think they managed to generate enough fusion to charge and electric bike! 16mw for a moment. I was thinking it would be good to have a fusion powered electric bike of seeing as it is a fitting shape for it!- edit-actually the current record from the tocamak is self sustained fusion power for 16 MW for less than a second and 5 MW for 5 seconds. still more impressive is 30,000'C in there which is hotter than the sun. .
 
on this video at 1.51mins they have a vortex simulation of some pressure waves on a lenz hex version. it would make very much sense to gather performance measurements of weird propellers by printing single fantasy propellers and turning them around in a wind tunnel and measuring the force on them at 360 degrees of wind and different wind speeds. then it would be possible to find the best windfoils and then arrange concetrically.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYMZvnER0BQ&t=1m51s
 
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