Your Questions About Water Wheel Power

admin answers:

These guys sell the things and should be able to guide you

http://www.ampair.com/ampair/waterpower.asp

admin answers:

Farms used to use wind generator systems that charged a bank of batteries and the household appliances used the batteries for power. I would approach the problem in a similar way in that I would use an alternator or generator to charge batteries. I would then use semiconductor invertors to change the battery power to 120 Volt 60 Hz house power. The battery bank would have to be quite large, possibly using golf-cart batteries. The invertor again would have to be large. I suspect the best way to do the system would be to supply each fused (circuit breaker) line in the house with a separate inverter. I bought a 2000 watt/4000 watt peak, inverter for a little over $100. This will supply about 15 Amps at 120 volts.
You really have to think this through. I don’t know how to connect a water wheel to an alternator, although the power is available, the speed of the wheel vs. The required alternator speed is large.
Hope this helps.

admin answers:

You don’t convert water to electricity, you convert gravity to electricity.

You need ‘head’ which relates to the height of the water. You then have a hydraulic gradient between two (or more) points. It is possible you already have that gradient and pressure in which case you only need the wheel. If you don’t have the head, you may need to create it using a reservoir coupled to a race. In the race is the waterwheel.

Water wheels may be either vertical or horizontal. Efficiencies may be as high as 70% (with backshot wheels). Most powerful wheel was about 100hp but don’t expect that sort of power unless you have a lot of water available.

admin answers:

There are several types of designs
kaplan

http://images.google.ca/images?gbv=2&hl=en&sa=1&q=kaplan+turbine&aq=1&oq=kaplan&start=0

Francis

http://images.google.ca/images?gbv=2&hl=en&sa=1&q=francis+turbines&aq=0&oq=francis+turbine&start=0

pelton

http://images.google.ca/images?gbv=2&hl=en&sa=1&q=pelton+turbines&btnG=Search+images&aq=f&oq=&start=0

These are water turbines, the objective is always to recuperate as much energy as possible
the same goes with the fan

the particular design depends on how much pressure, the speed of rotation, the speed of the air flow…

No simple thing!
But worth lots of fun to experiment, good engineering

in your example you may also need some transmission to convert the speed of the water turbine as it will probably not spin fast enough for the air turbine

Guru

admin answers:

You are probably wanting to power a 1000 Watt AC fixture. There is really a lot more information that would be useful to ascertain what would be the best configuration for your set-up.

What is running the water wheel? Is it a natural flowing stream of some sort? Or is the water run from a pump? If it is a natural source of water then you might just be able to run a generater directly off of the water wheel.

There are lots of different generators, you will have to calculate RPM at the shaft requirements to find if you can attain 1000 watts of power at 125V AC. It might be simpler to do a system similar to the link below in DC.

There are all kinds of options, depending on your requirements. Sounds like a fun project… Good luck.

admin answers:

They irrigated Fields for crops

http://www.uncp.edu/home/rwb/egyptian_pump2.jpg