It was during this trip that I installed the off grid system in the Venecia house and shared my dreams of living and working with turbines in Nicaragua to a great friend (and honourary Director of Costa Rican Affairs for Metric Motion Renewable Energy) Julian Morales. His reaction and response really made me realize that these ideas were realistic and he told me that environmental conservation is a huge topic in Costa Rica with many people looking for practical renewable energy systems and this attitude is really growing in Nicaragua. Julian has helped me ever since from helping us set-up in the beach house, to transporting magnets from Costa Rica to the lab, spreading the word of our projects in Costa Rica. I feel grateful and lucky to have such great people working with us. Later that night, standing there on the beach under the stars I decided I would move there and start this project. After that I began designing and researching the work which leads us to day. Here's a photo of Mendardo and I during the installation of solar panels for the Venecia house.
Okay, enough ancient history. In May we made a bit of internet news when the University of Windsor did an interview with Kyle and published a nice article on their website. If you missed seeing it you can check out a PDF copy available here... http://www.pdfhost.net/index.phpAction=Download&File=543e0fda21b6b96856bdc1c86b86f24a
In June we built another M1 prototype using what we learnt from the fabrication and sailmaking techniques used on the M2. Here's a photo of the rotor during when we were mocking up the new single sided lift-type blades.
The new M1 prototype is built around a welded steel rotor with improved sailblades, which have improved the turbines start-up and high speed performance over the previous framed sailblade design (comically refered to as the whale blades due to their resemblance to a whale's tail). The new rotor and blade set was installed on the original tree pole tower.
After observing both the M2 and the newly improved M1 I was most impressed with the low speed performance of these machines. Each was producing usable electricity for our batteries at the speed of 3.0 m/s. Unfortunately, by the time we left in mid-June, the winds had slowed to their rainy season norm and we rarely saw consistant winds above 6 m/s so we weren't able to see the full power curve of the machines. Right now we're planning to solve this by completing vehicle based power testing for all our future M1-sized turbine designs. Essentially this will involve mounting the complete turbine on a large truck and driving it through a range of speeds (simulating wind speeds) on a clear stretch of land (ie. the beach at low tide) while recording RPM, power output, and apparent wind speed variables. This is one of the main experiments we have planned for our return to Nicaragua towards the end of summer.
Since arriving back in Canada we're now working on yet another M1 turbine building it out of our small shop in Aurora, Ontario. The turbine is essentially the rotor and blades from the latest M1 prototype situated in a caged frame. This new bearing/frame arrangement will improve the architectural versitility of the turbine, allowing for flexable mounting options on buildings, roofs, concrete structures, monopole and lattice type towers. It will also ease transport of the turbines which will begin to be a increasingly important issue as our number of projects grow. Be sure to check in for more updates on the new build over the next few weeks.
Anyways, thats all for now.
-Kyle
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