Since the last update I spent a great amount of time doing more engineering & technical design work on the wind turbines for the book. I worked specifically on the generator and my main goal was to validate the generator and wind turbine rotor calculations that I’ve done and relied on so far, because that is the foundation of the whole design. That includes for example comparing my calculations and spreadsheets with real data measured on turbines that were built in practical workshops following the design. It turned out that it was worth the effort: I found some small errors and deviations when doing that comparison which I can fix now for more accurate results.
I also spent good time doing some CAD drawings for the book. A job that I do enjoy even though it is sometimes tricky. But thats when you learn and get better at it. I also had to switch my cad software from proprietary to open source.
During all this tasks I try to do a lot of networking with my friends and experts from the field to exchange ideas, validate my work and get inspiration.
Now the practical wind turbine workshop season is about to start.
I managed to organize 3 public hands-on courses which will take place during the summer months and be open for everybody to attend. That also requires a lot of work now and also offers the chance for me to test and validate new drawings and workflows for the book in a real life workshop situation.
In general I realize that there is a lot of stuff to learn for me during this book project. Since a long time I have a clear picture of the finished book in my head, but it’s a whole different story when you actually get down to work. I might have underestimated the amount of time that goes into certain stuff. For example, sometimes I find it quite difficult to define something as „good enough“ for the book and stop spending extra hours on trying to improve it more. It’s important for me to keep a certain standard of quality but I also tend to get lost in details easily. So I try to aim for the middle between the two extremes.
Until the next update, now back to work!
Jonathan
