Omnidirectional Wind Turbine
Small-scale wind turbine with power measurements
This project is a small-scale omnidirectional wind turbine, designed to generate power from wind arriving from any direction. Alongside the turbine model, I built a measurement setup that records the voltage, current and power it produces.
The design
The turbine is modeled in Onshape as a rounded shell with curved blades inside, so wind can turn it from any direction.
Measuring the power
An Arduino reads an Adafruit INA219 sensor that measures bus voltage, shunt voltage, current and power. It takes a reading every half second and stores the power values in the Arduino's EEPROM, so they can be read out later over the serial port. The sensor is calibrated for the 16 V, 400 mA range, which gives higher precision for a small generator.
A second version of the code is set up for outdoor runs, where the readings are averaged over two-minute windows so a long test fits in the limited memory.
Indoor test
To test indoors, a household fan blew on the turbine at three speeds. The fan draws 0.56 A, 0.625 A and 0.73 A at 120 V (about 67, 75 and 88 W) at speeds 1, 2 and 3. At each speed I recorded the peak power of the turbine at distances from 0.5 to 2 ft.
- Highest output: 4.79 mW, at the strongest fan speed and 0.5 ft away
- Output falls as the turbine moves away from the fan, to between 0.5 and 1.6 mW at 2 ft
- The strongest fan speed gave the most power at every distance
Documents and links
Indoor data (PDF) Code and files on GitHub 3D model in Onshape