Miniature Table Top Wind Turbine Simulator!
This table top 0.003 scale model miniature turbine mimics and simulates a giant offshore wind turbine, which has been designed to behave same patterns like speed or yawing etc, and can be digitally controlled!

Background

An MNC customer making wind turbines wanted miniature digitally controlled simulators to be built! And thus we embarked on designing this scale model, mostly made of aluminum, except the blades. Parts were designed to scale, motor/gearboxes were chosen to scale to suit the dimensions!

Several such turbines are rigged together to form the Miniature Wind Farm/Grid Simulator!

Nearly finished Miniature Wind Turbines

Close up view of the Miniature Wind Turbine

Miniature Wind turbines rigged up for testing/quality control

Underneath the turbine, sits an electronics stack which has proprietary software, which can control the nacelle motor and yaw motor as commanded digitally!

Slip ring used below allows continuous rotation of nacelle (head of turbine) for the longevity of the miniature turbine, although the real turbines do not come with such a feature.
Minitature, Scale model Wind turbine that responds to digital commands

The Turbines can be controlled from other subsystem through Serial/SPI protocols as desired! We also built a Windows GUI app to test and control them individually.
The miniature Wind turbine took nearly 3 months to build, test and qualify as per the specifications! It took over a year to do its reliability engineering to make it long lasting.

How it was built?

Click on left/right buttons to scroll through the pictures and description to see how it was built!