Training time with blueEnergy: How we built a windturbine

By Gaetan Russo -- During two weekends, blueEnergy gathered fifteen people together in order to build a wind turbine, which was a smaller model of the wind turbine blueEnergy builds in Nicaragua.

The principal idea of this training was that we started with raw materials and built the wind turbine step by step, this was not only an assembly of the different parts of the wind turbine but also the building of these parts before their assembly.

The different parts of the wind turbine and its construction:

A wind turbine is composed of different parts. The first one is the blades, which are made from three blocks of wood which we measured, cut and polished with different tools.

Carving a blade

The second part of the wind turbine is the rotor-stator system. This system converts the rotation of the blades into electric current. The rotor is composed of eight magnets and the stator by eight coils. The coils were made by winding 140 turns of copper wire. After, both the stator and rotor were set within resin during one day. They were then removed from the mold. Then, the reels and the magnets were protected.

The followed part is the electronic part, which was to change the alternate current into direct current: we did some micro-welding with electronic component (diodes).

The body of the wind turbine was built by putting together several metallic tubes by arc-welding, which illustrates that this training offered us the opportunity to do activities which we don’t practice usually.

The benefits of this training for blueEnergy and us:

This training is the opportunity for blueEnergy to illustrate one of their activities in Nicaragua. It sensitizes people and highlights the activities of blueEnergy. More generally, the permits to people to discover the organization.

Explaining the rotor

For people it was the chance to work together, to meet others and to build something with their hands in a lively atmosphere.

I invite you to join us during the next training in France: April 21st and 22nd!

For more information, please contact Emilie Etienne at emilie.etienne@blueenergygroup.org