S4w's Wind Generator Notes

When one is building an alternator for a windmill there is always a compromise
that must be made in order to get the desired results. One of the most
important decisions that one must make is to choose a suitable cut-in speed
for the propeller that is going to be used.

If the cut-in speed is too low, the alternator will stall the propeller and
not much power will be gathered from the wind. If the cut-in is too high then

To recap a little bit Ill briefly explain how the sine wave inverter works. Basically this inverter is a Class D audio power amplifier designed to work with high voltages. The inverter creates a square wave suitable for MOSFET switching with minimal power loss as heat because the MOSFETs will not be in the linear region. There is an on-board sine wave generator that is used as the input signal to the “amplifier”. After filtering out the high frequency square wave, the amplified input signal generated by the on-board oscillator remains.

The clear winner of the last poll was the fourth option. Most visitors would like to see kits to build either a Boost converter for windmill, a buck converter or a charge controller.

I am working on all of them in parallel at this moment. I would like to have a few suggestions about which one visitors would like to see available first. I have no preference what so ever so its your choice world.

As usual I will have the schematics of the kits available to the public.

Happy voting.

Ok, here are the tests for my boost converter. First of all I will clarify that it is running at 100kHz and the output diode is a fast diode with forward voltage drop of 0.7V. I started using a 14uH inductor thinking that it would be the right value for the input voltage range expected, but it turned not to be the case.

NOTE: Click on the image for a larger view

The next section that I am going to describe is the boost converter part. This section will take power from a DC voltage source (batteries) and step it up to the required voltage by the inverter.

First lets discuss how inductive boost converters work. In the schematics shown the most basic boost converter uses a switch, a diode, an inductor and an output capacitor.

NOTE: This picture have been released to the public domain by the author and it was modified by me.

The goal of this series of pages is to explain and ultimately build a high efficiency pure sine wave inverter (DC to AC converter) from scratch. I have been working on this project for about 6 months and so far the inverter is basically working.

Ive decided to do a little face lift to this web page. I hope that everyone likes the new appearance. Take the poll feature to your advantage and please let me know what would you like to see next in this website.