Wind Turbine Remix

thingiverse

I made some changes to the eolienne (wind turbine) design by Gwlad55. If you want to replicate my effort, you'll need to combine his parts with my modified components. First, I replaced the aluminum tube specified by Gwlad55 with an eight mm diameter carbon fiber tube. Next, I cross-drilled the spacers between the bearings of both the horizontal and vertical shafts using a 2mm drill bit. Then, I inserted a 14mm long piece of 1.75mm filament and secured it with cyanoacrylate adhesive. I heated the blade of a screwdriver and mushroomed both ends of the filament, similar to peening over the end of a metal rivet. When pressing in the bearings, I added a few drops of adhesive to secure them in place within the main body. The bearings and shafts are now firmly held in position and won't fall out. I wanted to make it easy to remove and reinstall the blades for transport purposes. To achieve this, I split the blade hub into two parts using Fusion 360. The nose is now a removable spinner with a captive nut. I used a 7mm bolt and nut familiar to those who use eSUN filament spools, but a standard 7mm bolt and nut should work. When printing this part, print it nose up and pause the print at layer 50 (if you're printing at 0.2mm resolution). Drop the nut into the cavity and resume the print. Check your slicer to ensure pausing at layer 50 is suitable for your setup. I cut off the head of an eSUN 7mm bolt, inserted it into the horizontal shaft, and secured it with cyanoacrylate adhesive. This allows the blade hub assembly to be installed and held in place by tightening down the spinner. Removal is a simple matter of loosening the spinner. To prevent the hub from rubbing against the body, I added a counter bore to the aft face of the blade hub. Print an additional short spacer and secure it to the hub assembly with a drop of adhesive. This forms a boss that ensures the hub assembly only contacts the bearing inner race. I scaled the blades 150% in the span direction only to achieve longer lengths. I also wanted to print them horizontally for better strength, so I used Cura to orient the blade to the horizontal position and then twisted the blade pitch so it was leading edge down. To limit support material, I adjusted the orientation and printing settings to confine support to a 4mm wide strip along the entire leading edge. Finally, I arranged the blade diagonally across my build plate for printing. The support was easy to remove, and two minutes of sanding and polishing gave me a very nice leading edge. To balance the weight of the longer blades and make the wind turbine more sensitive to changes in wind direction, I extended the tail boom and printed the tail feathers in a slightly different shape. I printed a mounting base with a built-in Arca-Swiss photographic tripod mount so I could quickly mount the wind turbine to my existing tripod. However, I soon realized that the blades interfered with my tripod. The solution was simple: I used a piece of carbon fiber tube with an eight mm ID to extend the height of the wind turbine, preventing the blades from hitting the tripod. While it works, this isn't the most elegant solution. I'll probably leave it as is, but you might want to design and print a base more suited to your individual mounting scheme. I've included the STL file for reference.