Gen project - beginnings

As a class we are undertaking a joint generation project. The goal- run our classroom on the power we generate and feed the grid with the excess.

The types of generators we are trying to create are: hydro, wind, solar and fossil fuels. All will be joint at a common bus to charge batteries and run our inverters.

As a team we have Hydro

We will post our progress in this blog and the research we do to get our generator generating.

 

This is what we are starting off with, the leftovers of last years attempt.
We have a Pelton wheel turbine, a bath and pump to simulate river flow/ creek flow/ water head... whatever.
Now we are not trying to create some sort of perpetual energy machine, we are not going to attempt to power our pump from the energy we generate. That simply won't work. The pump will be running off an external energy supply and is not counted as being part of our system, it is just there to get some water moving as we don't have access to a river.

We are using a Fisher and Paykel Smart-Drive washing
machine motor for our generator.

As it stands our set-up is not plug and play, previous attempts have found that when the generator is connected to a load, the water pump is not powerful enough to spin the Pelton wheel.

Throughout this generation project our team will publish updates on our progress to power our classroom and successfully construct a mini hydro generator.