DEEPAK RAJA D: Home Made Wind Power Generator

How It all started??

I was wondering how to produce electricity from wind energy? I thought this when I was young and I was able to make one now :). It all started when I was removing my old 3.14" floppy drive from my computer. When I examined the drive, I got a stepper motor from that. After I had got stepper motor, I googled for a suitable wind bladge. I got some cool stuffs about making wind balade with PVC pipes. So, I started working on it and I was successfull in generating power.

Requisites

1 Stepper Motor (12V)
8 Diode 25V (reverse break down voltage). Any thing greater than or equal to 12V will do
2 Capasitors 1000pF 16V(or some thing near that value)
1 LED (this is the load)
Some wires
PVC pipe of length 70cms with diameter as 15cm or more..
4 nuts with bolts
Some metal scraps to fix the wind blade with the stepper motor.

The Stepper Motor

Inside a stepper motor are four coils of wire located 90 degrees away from each other - i.e. at positions 12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock. In the middle is the rotor which spins and has permanent magnets fitted around its circumference. As the rotor spins each magnet in turn approaches, passes, and moves away from each of the four coils in turn. A magnet passing a coil of wire causes electricity to flow through that coil and so each of the four coils will have different amounts of electricity flowing through it either one way or the other - alternating current.

Since a stepper motor has four coils of wire, it is said to be a four-phase motor. The advantage of this multi-phase set-up for electricity generation projects is that when one coil has no electricity flowing through it, the next coil will have reached its maximum. When the four-phases are brought together and rectified (more on rectification later) into direct current (DC), the total electricity generated therefore has a near constant voltage and current.

Place you can see stepper motors are FAX machine, Document copier, Floppy drives. I took the stepper motor from my old 3.14" floppy drive.

The Wind Blade

Cut the PVC pipe with 60cm length.

Then follow the below sketch to cut the pipe and make the blade.

I used Angled Cut as in this design and It worked really good.

The Circuit

We will be using two A/C to DC bridge as we have two coils. The circuit diagram is as follows.