Bench Testing a Whisper Turbine Generator
Open Access
- Author:
- Siegmund, Michael Scott
- Area of Honors:
- Aerospace Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Dr. Dennis Mc Laughlin, Thesis Supervisor
Dennis K Mclaughlin, Thesis Supervisor
Richard Randolph Auhl, Faculty Reader
Dennis K Mclaughlin, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Wind Turbine
Generator
Efficiency
Dynamometer - Abstract:
- With today’s economy and fossil fuel issues, wind power is becoming more and more important. Experiments on full scale industrial turbines are both time consuming and expensive. The Penn State aerospace engineering department is working on a small scale turbine that can be used to model the larger turbines, at a much smaller cost. One important part of the process is to know the efficiency of the generator being used. This paper describes the construction of a testing facility and its use. In order to know the efficiency, both the input and output powers are needed. The output power is obtained from the electrical systems attached to the generator. The input mechanical power was calculated by constructing a cradled dynamometer. The dynamometer consists of an electrical motor suspended by its shafts on two bearings and a lever arm extending from the motor to a load cell. The force in the load cell times the lever arm is the torque, which can be used with the shaft RPM to find the mechanical input power. The generator was run through three different tests, one each with one, two, and three resistors in series, and each test ranging nominally from 100-600 RPM. The generator efficiency ranged from 59% up through 84%. As the wind turbine project at Penn State progresses, a more precise version of the dynamometer may be constructed in order to get a more accurate representation of the efficiency plots.