Gosh, well-considered analysis of each of the major contributors to efficiency -- if you are at all interested in this kind of stuff, it's worth it to just page though the 77 pages.

Besides being able to scavenge alternators from junked cars, potentially lowering the cost-per-watt, there must be economies of scale that are pushing toward absolute garagutan wind power converters (there is nothing 'generated' here, that's a bad term. Power is converted.) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/business/GE-wind-turbine.... GE Haliade-X 13MW Wind Turbine, 722 ft diameter, 853 ft high. (The 86th floor observatory on the Empire State Building is at 1,050 ft)

I usually read it as being a electricity generator, not a power generator, in that a 'diesel generator' does not make diesel, but electricity from diesel.

Sure, the capital expenditure is primarily around the site, the base, and the tower. If you are putting one in at all, it pays to go big. The site is generally the only recurring payment. That’s why a lot of farmers who host them on their land stop farming. Wind farm operators pay really well.

>> there must be economies of scale that are pushing toward absolute garagutan wind power converters

Well yeah. Twice the diameter is 4x the available power at the same wind speed. Wind tends to be faster higher up too.

World's biggest wind turbine shows the disproportionate power of scale;

https://newatlas.com/energy/worlds-biggest-wind-turbine-ming...

Looks like an excellent treatment to move in the direction of making the most of the common automotive alternator.

There's a lot of idle surplus units everywhere, plus almost all of them in use only generate electricity when fuel is being burnt. So there's plenty of upside by repurposement for widespread capture of new clean energy.

However it seems like the use of a field coil instead of permanent magnets is a compromise in efficiency that was made to save cost per unit, especially considering that the potential energy generated in excess of nominal is always going to be unused in automotive application.

I would like to see them take a look at the much more uncommon commodity units having permanent magnets and go through the equations on that. Like from farm equipment or even actual portable or stationary generators where the IC engines are worn out or too costly to run but the electrical parts can be repurposed.

Could probably come up with some fairly simplified rules of thumb about mechanical interfacing for wind capture, plus electrical interface for delivery, and I would expect both to be quite a bit different than the field coil units.

I feel like putting some more intelligent power circuitry around a repurposed automotive alternator could yield efficiency gains. Since they all run in the same narrow specification range, you might be able to make some universal system. With a smart enough computer you can directly manage the tricky bits in software. Some minor modifications might be required (e.g. remove existing diodes so we can use active rectification).

Plenty of people in remote Yukon and Alaska use an alternator from a wrecking yard and make some kind of water wheel / turbine to drop in a river or creek. They work exceptionally well, though the water being solid for ~5 months of the year is a problem.

I looked into that at one point, but IIRC, the challenge was that the alternator was tuned to have the most optimal output when it was running at thousands of RPMs, so it's not just a matter of hooking wings to an alternator.

That's not hard to fix. You need to use some kind of mechanical system to connect the shaft on the water wheel to the Alternator, which means you can use gears.

So put a huge gear on the shaft of the water wheel and a tiny gear on the shaft of the alternator.

What tons of people do to play around with the optimal setup is to use an old bicycle rear tire for the water wheel and the whole chain and gears setup to connect to the alternator. That way you can change gears while it's running and figure out the optimal gear ratio.

I'm chuckling to myself now because I'm thinking that you could do maximum power point tracking automatically if you used one of the electronic derailleur systems like Shimano Di2.

Haha, that had never occurred to me because most of us use whatever rusty old setup is lying around!

Direct drive washing machine motors like from Fisher and Paykel seem to work well.

https://www.thebackshed.com/windmill/Contents.asp#3 has some details, and in the forums there.

Could you potentially use gearing to achieve this?

Looks like they found a gear ratio of about 8 was good for their setup.

Moving up to a ratio of 10 would be best using more advanced circuitry.

Title should include (2012).

thnx , being a ~ factually based piece not prone to change over time, i skipped out on that, however things such as efficiency rating, parts availability etc. will change. [title modded]