Donald Cooksey: NASA Wind Generation Project
(Page 5 of 9)
May/June 1976
By the Mother Earth News staff
PLOWBOY: When do you expect to publish that manual?
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COOKSEY: I couldn't really say, but I'm sure that—at the earliest—it won't be available until after we've completed our five-year program. Probably longer. These things never go as fast as you'd like them to.
Right now, for instance, we're trying to check the 100-kw plant out at 20 rpm—half its designed operational speed-and we can't even do that until we've debugged the computer that converts our instrument readings to engineering units. We thought we'd have our 20-rpm and 30-rpm tests run by now and that we'd be analyzing the windplant's operation at its full 40 rpm at this time . . . but, thanks to that computer, we're still fiddling around with the 20-rpm analysis.
I hasten to add, by the way, that the 100-kw WTG's performance is checking out just as predicted at 20 rotations per minute. The stresses in the blades—the operation of the hub and bearings and shafts and all the rest—are all coming out within predicted limits. So it's not the windplant itself that's holding us up . . . it's the calibration of the test equipment.
PLOWBOY: But is the 100-kw turbine actually running the way it was designed to operate? As I understand it, you're manually controlling some of the machine's functions that should be automatically directed by equipment within the windplant itself.
COOKSEY: Oh, sure. That's one of the areas we're anxious to get on to. Once we've checked the WTG out at its full operational speed, we want to try running it in a mode completely controlled by what we call a micro-processor . . . which is just a very simplified mini-computer. It's just printed circuit cards—nothing complicated at all—but it contains all the commands and logic that are needed to run the machine completely unattended.
Now this is actually no big deal, but we do have to progress on to this step in our program before we'll have a windplant that's going to be practical for a small community. A 100-kw generator can furnish all the electricity that 10 or 15 or, in some cases, up to 30 houses ever need . . . but it's not a very practical method of producing that power if someone has to sit around day and night monitoring the machine all the time. There's just too many man-hours of labor involved.
We can live with manually controlling our prototype for a few weeks until we have all our test equipment functioning properly. But our WTG isn't going to appeal to anyone until we have it operating automatically all by itself.
PLOWBOY: What about the excess electricity that your plant produces when the wind is blowing hard but nobody has many appliances turned on? And what about the reverse . . . when there's no wind at all but everybody wants electricity? Do you plan on feeding the WTG's output into a bank of batteries . . . or in storing that output in some other way?
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