Great job on your windbelts!
And it is nice that it seems easy (and cheaper) to build one, than to purchase a model/kit from Humdinger. I am wondering why the magnets and coils are placed on the edges? Wouldnt it be able to produce larger amount of "work" if placed on the exact centre of the belt?
And what would you guess to be the shortest/smallest prototype possible to build? (since you remarked on that your version was a bit too big) I want to do calculations to compare with regular wind-turbines total swept surface area. To see if a large number of windbelts mounted as a rack/array covering the same squarefeet would produce larger amount of energy.
Keep being creative! --Yeahvle 14:46, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
- Thank you for visit our website and pay attention to our windbelt ! First, this is our first time attempt to make a windbelt, so we purchased a lot of material for testing, such like different standards magnets and coils, once we have more experience and knowing what to buy exactly, the price will be much lower.
- The reason we put magnets and coils at the edge is because the middle of the belt is where the belt takes wind power into vibration strength, any object at the middle would influence and break the vibration process, not only at the middle, any places toward to middle would hurt the vibration performances, in order to vibrate better the magnets and coils need to be at the edges.
- Bob Feng
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Thank you for showing interest in the Buzzards' Windbelt!
First, the middle of the windbelt definitely moves a lot more then the ends of the belt. However, we found it really hard to put magnets on the center of the belt, as the slightest amount of mass would make the belt move erratically. We discovered that placing the magnets toward the end of the belt (not on the very end), gave a good balance between frequency and depth of the magnet's movement around the coils. This allowed greater, and more consistent energy production and also allowed us to use bigger magnets.
Second, I'm not sure what the exact smallest prototype size would be, but after our project I'm confident a smaller windbelt could have been built. Honestly, I feel that a Windbelt array with 1-2 foot Windbelts would be the easiest to contruct and test based on how we constructed our MultiBelt Windbelt. We found that our long belt could take advantage of more available wind, but we thought it was harder to tune because of its size. A smaller Windbelt size would probably be a lot easier to tune, and to test (i.e. you could use a regular sized circular fan to test the array.)
Thanks for showing interest in your project and If you have any more questions feel free to ask them!
P.S. Cool project, it sounds really cool! I'm also really curious about the efficiency of Windbelts (especially at a large scale.) versus the efficiency of Wind Turbines.
John "Dustin" Wiesner
Hey Team Buzzards, some feedback on your Appropedia page.
- Nice sortable criteria table
- Make sure you credit all photos to someone
- CAD drawings should be legible from the page view so I made a couple of your pictures bigger
- Include links to your own pages
Great page guys, you can tell a lot of work went into to this page and project. Make sure you put links to your own pages too.
-Annie Bartholomew
- I have made some research and comparisons now. Humdinger windbelts can produce 85-100 kWh/year in an array of one square meter (@wind speeds of 6m/s). Large conventional wind turbines can produce 700-1400kWh/year per swept square meter(@ average wind speeds of 8-12m/s. Most larger turbines need 8m/s to move!)
- So there is no comparison in remote locations, but however for urban rooftops (where it is impossible to get permission for large conventional wind turbines, and wind speeds are always below 8m/s) the windbelts are a reasonable solution. --Yeahvle 12:40, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
- I'm also not sure about urban use - I think they're quite noisy, so the neighbors will complain. --Chriswaterguy 04:59, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
After all the time I spent on this project it seems that windbelts are rarely a more appropriate design than a wind turbine. It is dificult to find the right materials, and they are very finnicky. However, they are cool and a great project if you want to overcome outrageous frustrations and learn a bit about electronics.
Dustin Revel Buzzards Member