5V from Portable Wind Turbine

5V from Portable Wind Turbine 

5V from Portable Wind Turbine 

T.K. Hareendran

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This project deals with the design and development of a portable wind turbine unit, capable of generating electricity from the kinetic energy in the wind. The circuit requires a DC motor, fan blades or propeller, DC-DC boost converter and wind energy to produce a 5V DC output.

Wind-power generation is a fairly simple process that uses an ordinary miniature DC motor to make a very simple wind turbine generator. A miniature DC motor, like RF-300FA-12350, is easily available in the market but can also be taken out from an old CD/DVD drive/player (refer Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Miniature DC motor

Fig. 2: Wind turbine blades/propeller

Fig. 3: DC-DC boost converter

Fig. 4: Circuit diagram for deriving 5V from the   portable wind turbine

A small propeller, or fan blades, can be mounted directly onto the motor shaft. Note that the electricity generated by the motor is DC, and hence no AC-DC conversion circuitry is required apart from a polarity guard diode. In fact, the polarity guard diode is also not required since the propeller rotates in only one direction (counter-clockwise) in this model, due to the unique design structure of the plastic wind turbine blades/propeller.

Compact and light-weight plastic fan blades/propellers are available. A generic three-leg plastic propeller (shown in Fig. 2) is used in this project.