2015-06-05 (F) Weekly Summary

Finding an easy method for bisecting bottles by hand was more difficult than expected. Fortunately this meant the durability of the bottles should be sufficient for prolonged outdoor use. By hand the bottle bottoms were cut with saws from 6tpi to 50tpi, Teeth Per Inch. All the blades were cumbersome but produced acceptable cuts. A motorized solution would probably be the best. The thin sides of the bottles were still cut with scissors and a razor knife which worked well. There were no cutting accidents.

Tools for bisecting the first bottle

Ten bisected bottles

With enough bottles to fill the bottle holders four turbines were constructed and installed on the testing stations. The structure turned out to be cumbersome but it was eventually installed off the porch railing. Results were surprising. None of the designs were capable of turning the generator so all movement is the result of removing the band from the pulley and allowing the turbine to spin freely. To reduce some of the hindrance of the generator smaller pulleys were printed but not installed yet.

Cumbersome testing stations

Ineffective design shuddering in low wind

2 bottle design spinning well

4 bottle design spinning very well

Smaller pulleys

Another set of bottle holders were cut. These holders were designed to test the hypothesis that changing the spacing between the bottles would play a role in the reaction to wind. No numeric data was collected but visual observation showed that spacing plays a large role in reaction to wind. At this point the most desirable design seems to be one which places more distance between the bottles as opposed to having the bottles touching or overlapping. However, high wind did show sporadic, but very fast movement on the overlapping bottles which may prove the most useful if a generator is integrated into the design.

Bottle holders with different spacing

Differently spaced bottles spinning on test stations

The rest of the weekly summaries have been arranged by date.





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