Yesterday we told you about our Project Breeze work which is a new project to utilize 3D printing to harness the power of wind for energy generation. Today we continued our testing and are in the process of building our first blade for the project.
As you can see from the image on the right we are hard at work making the first blade. We have definitely had some trials and tribulation today as this is our fourth attempt at getting a single blade to print but we are confident we will have one in the next several hours, then we only need to create 2 more to begin testing.
We did verify our sizing was correct earlier today with the hub we printed yesterday (see below) and that the fit would be correct for cementing the blades to the hub.
As you can see the hub is pretty solid. The first hub was printed with ABS but we will need to test and make sure that material will stand up to the sun, head, cold and elements. We may coat the material or paint it to ensure some protection but this is all part of the testing. We estimate that the hub and blades will cost no more than $20 in materials when completed.
This attempt at printing all three blades at once failed miserably but we have an idea on how we can achieve this in the future. The idea is to be able to print all three blades in about 4 hours or so start to finish with the hub taking about 4 hours to get our plastic main parts done in under 8-10 hours. The housing is still being designed in the CAD program as well as the wind rudder that will ensure the fans are facing directly into the wind regardless of direction. We have also ordered our control circuits, batteries and remote monitoring (which will basically be a Raspberry Pi board and a modem for monitoring).
Stay tuned. This project may be in the testing phase in the next week or two and we are looking forward to seeing how far we can push this technology since it is always windy here on the coast.
NOTE: If you are interested in working with us on this project we are looking for interested parties that we can provide with their own turbines. Please call 800-447-2150 Ext. 6 and tell us you would like to test for us. Thank you for your support.