Calculators

[Polish Ninja]

Hello Everyone! Let me start out by saying I'm no electrical engineer or anything. BUT. I am a machinist with a very sound (not to toot my own horn....) mechanical aptitude. I've seen references to some pretty sweet sounding calculators (excel) for calculating just about everything. One in particular is the PMA Calculator.xls that I found yesterday. Looks like it has quite a bit of the mathematical equations built in but I'm a little confused by some of the terminology within it. If anyone is familiar with it I would be very grateful for any information you can provide on using it. Anyway...... after reading through a few posts it looks like there is more to be had. Would anyone be willing to share? Give me everything you have! My goal here is to have an open source project so everyone would have available all the resources to build their own machines. I'm VP at a machine shop so any machining required is no issue. I have absolutely no problems sharing any and all information. I'm not looking to get rich. I'm not going to play games and try to sell anyone a book. Just want to help people reduce their dependance on the grid.

[Chris Olson]

That was written by a team of people. The original version was SI units only. I converted the sheet from SI units to English units for folks that wanted an English version of the sheet. The spreadsheet tool will not give you a design that can be set in stone - it is designed to arrive at a design that is "close". The figures it supplies for output of a particular design are also only general guidelines and not what you will see in the real world.

On a revised version of the sheet that I did, I included a column on Sheets 2 & 3 to enter an adjustment factor for rotor Cp to arrive at a closer approximation of generator output. But entering the factors requires an intimate knowledge of the power curve of your rotor, and that is usually only gotten thru testing.

On another later version of it I included an entry for calculating losses in the transmission line.

The original was posted as an open source piece of software. I have several later revisions of it that are design specific and are not open source, so have never been made available to the general public.

That's about all I can tell you about it without going into some rather extensive details. The sheet is open source as it was uploaded and you may modify it as you wish. If you modify it and distribute your modified version for profit, then the modified version of the sheet must be made available to the general public for free.
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Chris

[Polish Ninja]

Honestly. I'm just really getting into this. I find it fascinating. For a first time project/build it would sure be nice to have someone with detailed plans and already proven results.

[Dale Sheler]

Do a google search on DIY axial flux turbines, there are several very good sites with thousands of pages of successful projects, try the 10th hit on the second page of google results.

[Polish Ninja]

Thanks. I'm checking out that site. Looks pretty good so far. I'm just amazed at how many sites just want to sell you their book.