Having successfully collected our Bergey turbine from its former home, we needed to tear down and inspect the various components of the power head to see what was wrong.The wind workers got a little help from Maintenance Director Roger Duval, pictured, a Master Electrician and an old hand with generators and like equipment.
Some problem-solving was required. The alternator on these machines bolts directly to a mainframe, composed of the yaw bearing and slip ring assembly and mounts for the tail boom, furling mechanism, and the alternator itself.
The mainframe is easily disconnected from the alternator at the connection flange. The alternator itself is somewhat less easily dismantled. In our case we hooked our tractor's fork lift to the flange and applied upward tension, tapping lightly on the magnet can with hammers.
The magnet can slid more or less gently off its own backing plate, revealing the stator and magnets.
We already suspected from the obvious misalignment of all the alternator parts that we would find damage, and we were right. The magnet can had been hanging loosely on its bearings and grinding on the stator.
There was less damage to the stator than we thought, but the magnets themselves were fairly heavily damaged.
Cleaning off all these iron filings and chunks of magnet will reveal the full extent of the damage, but at this point it looks as if we need at minimum a new magnet can and bearings.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I'm sorry to have to say that the number of spam comment postings has required that we turn off anonymous comment posting. There's been a massive boom in what seems like computer-automated spam comments with links to web pages that advertise cheap, nasty, bad-for-you products, mostly cigarettes.
From now on, you'll have to be a registered user to comment on this blog.
If you had something you wanted to say, but really didn't want your name attached to it for some good reason, you should email Mick at mwomersley@unity.edu
I'll protect your confidentiality and post your comment for you.