Load cell

On Tuesday last week we raised the new campus anemometer tower and wired up the weather station.

As we raised it we took some load cell measurements, to check our design calculations for the load on the anchors.

For checking the load on any anchor or guy line system, a load cell, AKA tension transducer, is the best solution. Ours was expensive, several hundred dollars, but a lot cheaper than a failed anchor.

The load on the lift anchor topped out at about 1,200 pounds. The anchor is designed for about 3,500 pounds.

The tower in its initial configuration is thirty feet of a recycled Bergey wind turbine tower with anemometers at 10, 20 and 30 feet. You can see wind shear in action by watching the different anemometers spin faster the higher they are.

A primary purpose of this tower is to study ground-level wind shears over very long periods of time.

By design, another ten feet is available to also allow the testing of small scale wind turbines, for which, however, a building permit would be required. Unity is one of those Maine towns that, in a panic about wind towers, passed an ordinance that restricts even the tiniest turbines.

In fact, such is the zeal of the anti-wind power activists in Maine who advocate for these ordinances, that if our students were to design and build a wind turbine one semester, and wished to test it, and the next semester decided to come up with a different design, a different building permit would be required each time.

This would apply even if the turbines had only a one-meter blade diameter.

And that, dear friends, is a really, really silly restriction.