土耳其秃参是海参吗:制作10英尺的风力发电机组（9）

第十一部分：建立风力发电塔

This page contains some thoughts and pictures about towers. The tower is perhaps one of the most important parts of a wind turbine. It can also be well over half the cost of a system overall. Guidelines suggest that a tower should be 30' above anything within a 300' radius in order to keep the turbine up in clean, non-turbulant wind. Air is very fluid (like water) - any obstruction to the wind creates turbulance (like the wake behind a boat). You cant see it, or detect it - but it's hard on a wind turbine and it costs lots of power. Oftain times the best time/money spent on a system is on a nice tall tower.
In practice, we cannot always follow guidelines, we have to work with available resources (time and money). In some places there are few obstructi** on the ground, the ground is flat - and an effective tower might be easy. Where we're located (in the Rocky Mountains) we have fairly tall trees - lots of ridgetops.. rocks poking up, unlevel ground - not a lot of money etc, so folks up here take what they can get.

Pictured above is an 80' guyed lattice tower with a 10KW Bergey machine on its top. Scary climbing this sort of thing!
There are a couple common approaches to building towers. Free standing towers require significant foundati**, they have no guy wires. They are either lattice towers, or made from pipe/tubing. Their main advantage I think is their appearance, and the very small footprint required. Most very large (utility scale) wind turbines are on free standing towers, they don't seem very commonly used in smaller system probably because of their cost. Guyed lattice towers are common. Usually they are erected with a jin pole or a crane - the same equipment would also be required to install the wind turbine. We have very little experience with these towers. Both types mentioned above require climbing. From here on, we'll discuss simple towers made from pipe that can be tipped up with a winch, or a truck.

Here is the bushing assembly we make for the tower stub. Basicly its just a cap that slips into the tower a couple inches. There is a large (1") diameter hole in the top. We put that in the tower, then we put the bronze bushing (a thrust bearing, a steel washer, or plastic bushing is also fine) over that. Then we run the wire through all that and put the machine over the top.

Thats how the same assembly shown above looks when its in the tower top. This is a good, simple/cheap solution. In the past I've put machines right over the pipe stub. They'd work fine usually for about 1 year, then the pipe would be wearing into the top of the wind turbine, sometimes all the way through - but always enough to make them stiff to yaw. This setup prevents that and should hold up for a very long time.
So those are just some thoughts and experiences with towers. Again, it's worth c**idering the scope of the project before you start. The tower is at least half the project if you're building your own system, and it's best to resign yourself to that fact from the very beginning. It may even be wise for some folks, to build the tower first! Seems like a lot of people build their wind turbines and never get around to the tower part. In my opinion -the tower is the hard work, the wind turbine is the fun part. Up here oftain times we have a bit of a 'tower raising' party - it can go quickly and be lots of fun if you can rope a few freinds and neighbors into it.