Integrity Energies - Wind
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Last Page Revision: 5/17/2017
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The below image close up is of a turbine with double element blades once mounted on a 12 foot wooden tower at the Tehachapi glider airport near a hangar building owned by Les King (rip), an associate. It was the result of testing over a period of time that evolved from earlier concepts. The videos below show various configurations during development. 
Video #1 - The popular Decorative Backyard Windmill from Harbor Freight Tools was modified to produce electricity. Here, on the second story apartment rear balcony, the doubled (look closely) sheet metal blades ran a bicycle generator quite well that lit some lights. This was despite the location, which speaks for the wind strength, i.e., not much. The turbine setup was then moved to the Rosamond, California town water processing facility grounds to run by itself in view of the neighborhood as seen in the video to show it off for the municipal officials and townspeople there. There it was captured running fast in their winds as a measure of the power available for a suggested moderate, 260 kw net billing wind turbine installation. Video #2 - This small vertical axis turbine was again mounted on the Decorative Backyard Windmill framework and again run on the second story apartment back balcony. Many attempts to design these by others failed even to get them to start up properly. (It was well noted that small Savonius rotors were added to the axis of some of them to accomplish start up.) Yet there it is with its double element designed blades turning at high rpms without any trouble of any kind at all. This turbine had no generator attached but a later version we had did have the Ametek generator that generated some quite reasonable energy. Video #3 - The glider airport wooden tower experiments resulted in a turbine using the 18.5" long "Trinado" blades of the TLGWindpower Company in Kansas, each with a 23" long flat, hand made, sheet metal second element affixed to its front side pitched to zero degrees with a gap between. This is the blade design shown in the image at the top of the page. The generator was the small Ametek generator popular with the DIY wind turbine crowd. The wind theories accepting flat, thin blade elements pitched to zero degrees have had mixed credence. Even so, the video shows how well it was found to run. The night time footage was to show its superiority to PV solar panels. Video #4 - This is the same blade rotor setup but with a larger generator furnished by another associate, Phil Stahlheber, who had been a wind turbine technician for the large, utility turbines up on the ridges. The generator was a Baldor 90 volt. It was so heavy that a rope system was needed to hoist it to the top of the tower. But it ran excellently, again, with these blades and in only moderate winds, lighting many lights, including 50 watt car headlights, as seen in the video. This, then, was a start revealing benefits of the double element blades. Added 5/17. This can be said. The three dimensions of physical space means that expanding blade rotors to capture more wind can be done in three different ways. We already understand radial capture, that is, making blades longer. Rotor plane capture is well understood also, that is, adding blades to the rotor, but more than three blades is expensive and weighty. But the third way, upwind capture, has not been given design recognition. This is the double element NoDrag Flap and other refinements to it, similar to the blades seen above. The wind, traveling much slower axially than the blades are traveling tangentially, can be found near full strength not very far upwind of each blade passing quickly by. The videos are quite telling of how performance was not reduced but quite satisfactory with this added feature. |
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