Tag Archives: Turbine

Power Generation Modules Mix and Match Wind, Water, and Hand Cranks

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What’s great about the Power Generation Modules project headed by [Cole B] is the focus on usability and modularity. The project is a system for powering and charging small devices using any number and combination of generator modules: wind turbine, hand-crank, and water turbine so far. Power management and storage is handled by a separate unit that acts as a battery bank to store the output from up to six generators at once. There’s also a separate LED lamp module, designed to be capable of being powered directly from any of the generator modules if needed.

The hand crank is …read more

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The Last Interesting Rover Had A Gas Turbine Engine

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If you have a car parked outside as you are reading this, the overwhelming probability is that it has a reciprocating piston engine powered by either petrol(gasoline), or diesel fuel. A few of the more forward-looking among you may own a hybrid or even an electric car, and fewer still may have a piston engine car powered by LPG or methane, but that is likely to be the sum of the Hackaday reader motoring experience.

We have become used to understanding that perhaps the era of the petroleum-fueled piston engine will draw to a close and that in future decades …read more

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Everything Worth Knowing about Lockwire

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We were tipped off to an older video by [AgentJayZ] which demonstrates the proper use of lockwire also known as ‘safety wire.’ In high vibration operations like jet engines, street racers, machine guns, and that rickety old wheelchair you want to turn into a drift trike, a loose bolt can spell disaster. Nylon fails under heat and mechanical lock washers rely on friction which has its limits. Safety wire holds up under heat and resists loosening as long as the wire is intact.

Many of our readers will already be familiar with lockwire since it is hardly a cutting-edge technology …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Modular, Rapid Deployment Power Station

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After a disaster hits, one obvious concern is getting everyone’s power restored. Even if the power plants are operational after something like a hurricane or earthquake, often the power lines that deliver that energy are destroyed. While the power company works to rebuild their infrastructure, [David Ngheim]’s mobile, rapid deployment power station can help get people back on their feet quickly. As a bonus, it uses renewable energy sources for power generation.

The modular power station was already tested at Burning Man, providing power to around 100 people. Using sets of 250 Watt panels, wind turbines, and scalable battery banks, …read more

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Typhoon-proof Wind Turbine

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While wind energy is rapidly increasing its market share across the world, wind turbines are not able to be constructed everywhere that they might be needed. A perfect example of this is Japan, where a traditional wind turbine would get damaged by typhoons. After the Fukushima disaster, though, one Japanese engineer committed himself to building a turbine specifically for Japan that can operate just fine within hurricane-force winds. (YouTube, embedded below.)

The “typhoon turbine” as it is known works via the Magnus effect, where a spinning object directs air around it faster on one side than on the other. This …read more

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Custom Cut Pinwheel Makes a Useful HVAC Duct Flow Meter

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Everyone is familiar with pinwheels, and few of us haven’t crafted one from a square of paper, a stick, and a pin. Pinwheels are pretty optimized from a design standpoint, and are so cheap and easy to build that putting a pinwheel to work as an HVAC duct flow meter seems like a great idea.

Great in theory, perhaps, but as [ItMightBeWorse] found out, a homemade pinwheel is far from an ideal anemometer. His experiments in air duct flow measurements, which previously delved into ultrasonic flow measurement, led him to try mechanical means. That calls for some kind of turbine …read more

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The Last Interesting Chrysler Had a Gas Turbine Engine

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The piston engine has been the king of the transportation industry for well over a century now. It has been manufactured so much that it has become a sort of general-purpose machine that can be used to do quite a bit more than merely move people and cargo from one point to another. Running generators, hydraulic systems, pumps, and heavy machinery are but a few examples of that.

Scale production of this technology also had the effect of driving prices for these engines down, and now virtually everyone in the developed world has cheap and easy access to them. In …read more

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DIY Wind Turbine for Free Energy

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With electricity cost going up and the likes of British Gas hiking up their price, everyone could use a bit of free energy. There are a number of ways to harvest renewable energy including solar and wind, however, the cost of setting up a wind farm can be quite high. [Mr Tickles] has uploaded a video where he has a cheaper DIY method of making a DIY wind turbine.

His project uses a commercial ceiling fan as a turbine for converting the wind energy into electricity. PVC pipes are used to mount the entire thing such that it becomes portable. …read more

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The Most Straightforward Wind Turbine

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We can all use a little more green energy in our lives at home. So when [ahmedebeed555] — a fan of wind power — ran into durability troubles with his previous home-built turbine, he revised it to be simpler than ever to build.

Outside of the DC generator motor, the rest of the turbine is made from recycled parts: a sponge mop sans sponge, a piece from an old CD drive case acting as a rudder, the blades from a scrapped fan, and a plastic bottle to protect the motor from the elements. Attach the fan to the …read more

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Hacking Into…. A Wind Farm?

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Pick a lock, plug in a WiFi-enabled Raspberry Pi and that’s nearly all there is to it.

There’s more than that of course, but the wind farms that [Jason Staggs] and his fellow researchers at the University of Tulsa had permission to access were — alarmingly — devoid of security measures beyond a padlock or tumbler lock on the turbines’ server closet. Being that wind farms are generally  in open fields away from watchful eyes, there is little indeed to deter a would-be attacker.

[Staggs] notes that a savvy intruder has the potential to shut down or cause considerable — …read more

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