On a recent visit to my sons place he presented me with a problem, he has novelty 10yr old Wind Vane that has a nine blade windmill/generator, It is supposed to light some LED's, now none are working, three of the blades each has 3 LED's mounted and wired in parallel, all three Blades with leds are also in parallel.
I checked the LED's they appeared OK.
On stripping it I expected to find some kind of magnetic material on the stator, it appeared to be all plastic,
I got 100Ω reading from the rotor.
I tried embedding some small powerful button magnets in the stator but still no joy.
I then opened up the rotor and found a single coil wound Concentrically around the stator!
The pic's posted show the construction, It seems to be very well made.
Two things have me puzzled, no magnet detected, and the stator coil wound Concentrically?
Anyone shed some (LED) light on my quandry?
(jpg3 is the rotor coil, 2 is the stator.)
In 2 the pointer is on the plastic body part under the coil.
Max.

 

Always figured it would only be time until wind power was proven to be a failure. Coal is the future!

 

Always figured it would only be time until wind power was proven to be a failure. Coal is the future!

I'm under a lot of pressure here with a reputation at stake!
Max.

 

I suspect its just a small AC generator, you should get some sort of AC voltage on the 2 wires when the shaft is spun. It wont be a lot of voltage. I have seen that style of AC generator used as speed sensors on motors in VCRs & a VDO Tacho generator on a diesel engine.

 

That is the way it is supposed to work, but still needs a field in my opinion, the stator shown is non magnetic, or at least does not show any magnetic properties!, and also the concentrically wound rotor does not make sense to me?
Max.

 

Multi pole stator. The Rotor should be magnetic with multiple N & S magnets embedded in the plastic. Looking at the rotor its probably Magnetic plastic type material as used in fridge magnets. Has the bearing failed in this unit & worn the Rotor in that odd shape destroying its magnetism?

 

If this is worn then it has probably now lost its magnetism & the clearance would now be too great.

 

Your first pic is actually the rotor, attached to the rotating blades, but I embedded button magnets in the stator and it made no difference.
Max.

 

The problem will be that the magnets don't match the multi poles now. You need a new rotor as it would have been multi pole to match the stator poles.

 

I think I will pick up one of the small 3 phase multi-pole generators on ebay for around $3.00 and modify it.
Max.