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Planning of mobile complete set for a rural wind generator
Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to alleviate the chronic lack of electricity supply in the rural South African areas by designing a portable wind generator kit.
An extensive assessment on the rural village of Ga-Rampuru, in Limpopo Province, was conducted, to investigate the present needs, as well as the availability of resources both human and material that would be needed to construct and assemble the system. From the inventory of recyclable materials found during the investigation the author was more inclined to suggest the design of a wind turbine that could be assembled and maintained by the local artisans.
A two pole permanent magnet synchronous generator was designed using standard commercial magnets, which were later replaced by recyclable loudspeaker magnets that were found in the village. This was done to compare the output of the generator in both cases. All the designs were modelled in FEMM, a software package, to estimate the induced voltage and flux of the generators.
Using standard commercial magnets the simulated voltage and flux levels were 9.4, 5.1, 3.6V and 0.0489, 0.0186, 0.0175 Wb, respectively. Assuming a generator current rating of 1 amp this would yield 36 watts at the estimated average wind speed of 4 meters per second.
Then when these were substituted with recycled speaker magnets the generator yielded a voltage of 3.5V and a flux of 0.0171Wb. The estimated output power of the recycled generator was estimated to be 10.5W. This compared well with the power output from the commercial magnets generators.
From these preliminary results it is quite apparent that a viable generator can be designed from the recyclable magnetic components. The same design procedure as outlined in this thesis can be used to design larger recycled generators with larger outputs. The design of this wind turbine will obviously have a wide range of positive developmental benefits on the community of Ga-Rampuru.
The next stage was practical construction to validate of the simulation results. This however could not be realised in time.
Chapter 1. Introduction
The author paid a visit to the Provincial ESKOM office to enquire about any plans to extend the grid to Ga-Rampuru village; and the Electrification Manager guaranteed that ESKOM has plans to ultimately electrify the whole country by 2012. However, further discussions with people from Ga-Rampuru dismissed the ESKOM Manager's promises as empty. They contended that they had heard similar promises but they still lived in darkness.
It was the conclusion of the author that an alternative solution to the problem had to be devised. Some means of generating electric power to meet loads such as the refrigerator in figure 1, if only it could be an affordable design. The best design would clearly be one that uses local material and human resources.
Figure 2.8 below shows the artist impression of the wind generator designed exclusively for Ga-Rampuru village.
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