West of Toronto

[trlvn]

Greetings! I'm a retired accountant living in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. I caught the machining bug last fall with the purchase of a tiny Atlas 618 lathe. That and Mr Pete's video s on YouTube.

One of the projects that I'm considering is a water turbine. My family operated a water-powered flour/feed mill for many decades. Through much of that time, the power came from a 16 foot head of water over a 36 inch cast iron turbine. The water-powered mill burned to the ground in 1962 but the turbine--being at the bottom of the pit--was spared. It was on display in front of the 'new' mill after that time.



I recently found patent drawings (Canada and USA) for similar models. Perhaps I can make a scale model? Unfortunately, I've got many competing interests and it may be some time before this one gets a turn.

BTW, these turbines work on inward flow from the side and out the bottom.

Craig

 

[Brian Rupnow]

Unfortunately, water wheels and water turbines don't really work too well when scaled down. This has to do with the restriction of water that is able to flow thru scale models. If you are only interested in making a non working scale model, then by all means go ahead and do so. Welcome to modelling world.--Brian Rupnow

 

[trlvn]

Unfortunately, water wheels and water turbines don't really work too well when scaled down. This has to do with the restriction of water that is able to flow thru scale models. If you are only interested in making a non working scale model, then by all means go ahead and do so. Welcome to modelling world.--Brian Rupnow

When you say it won't work too well, what do you mean? Say I make a 1/12 scale model, that would be a 16 inch column of water over a 3 inch turbine. I'm not expecting it to generate a big amount of power but it should turn something. No?

BTW, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the amount of water used by the full-size turbine. I believe that in the middle of summer, they could only run the mill for a few hours as the mill pond level would drop too low. The pond is roughly 500 m by 30 m in area. I think that about 1.5 m of water from the top would be about all that could be fed to the turbine. That would give about 22,500 cubic metres of water stored. There would always be some inflow into the pond so maybe another few thousand cubic metres. Say a total of perhaps 25,000 to 30,000 cubic metres. If I have the math right, 1 cubic metre of water weighs 1 tonne so 30,000 tonnes of water would go through the turbine on a _slow_ day! And this was just a little mill on a creek in a small village.

Craig

 

[Brian Rupnow]

I know of a couple of people who built small scale saw mills and other water driven mills, where everything was scaled down proportionally. They couldn't get a "to scale" amount of water make anything work.