Wind power to light up homes

Having borne the brunt of regular power outage, students of Vidyavardhaka College of Engineering (VVCE) have developed a project to provide electricity by harnessing wind energy.

Students H S Satish, Karthik M J, N Girish and Sharath M C — under the guidance of assistant professor S A Mohankrishna — have designed and fabricated a ‘Light duty vertical axis wind turbine’, which would help in providing power to homes.

Speaking to Deccan Herald, the team members said even minimum winds of 3.5 metres per second were sufficient to harness the energy and convert it into electricity.

The power generated by the wind turbine would range from 3W to 35 W.

The advantage of using the wind turbine is that it can be connected to battery and used whenever needed. It can light up two CFL lamps.

By adding alternators and two extra grids, power can be increased to light up to three rooms, they said.

Explaining about the working of the turbine, they said it collects wind and converts it into electricity, which in turn produces a 12 volt output which is used to charge one heavy-duty battery.

A small electricity generator designed for household installation is driven by a modified Savonius rotor (S-rotor).

Rotors

This type of rotor (which is vertical) was chosen instead of horizontal axis machine due to its simplicity and reliability.

S-rotor consists of three simple scoops, where one side catches the moving air more than the other causing the turbine to spin.

This design does not allow the turbine to spin faster than the oncoming wind.

This type of turbine is simple to build, and because it is vertical there is no need to have a mechanism to keep it turned into the wind.

The turbine frame is only one metre tall, which can be fixed to windows in households, which witness high wind speed.

The group has spent Rs 13,370 for developing the wind mill.