Detanglers for copper wire/power lines - Do they exist?

[Jimmerding]

Morning all,

I am currently designing a VAWT and am working on a contra-rotating turbine, but I am extremely new to electrical engineering as a whole, I just really like the idea of designing something like this as a fun project and possibly being able to benefit from lower power bills as a result!

The problem I am facing comes from the winding motion of the permanent magnets and my need to have power cables trailing down through a base. If I have just normal wiring, it will eventually start winding too tightly and need to spring back the other way. I've tried googling some sort of "detangler" device that will work for power cables, but have only found ones for telephone cables in call centers. Can anybody point me in the direction of something like this they know exists or perhaps a simple engineering solution that I am missing?

Thanks.

 

[Nidum]

slip rings

 

[Jimmerding]

slip rings

Perfect! Thanks for that.

As you can probably tell, I am an extreme layman! Is there any sort of volt/amp loss due to the process of a slip ring? metal/graphite plates grinding against another metal plate to pass current through seems like there is a lot of potential for energy to be lost, and do you know whether there would be significant friction in a slip ring? my VAWT is using magnetic bearings and I am trying to keep any mechanical friction to an absolute 0. Also, looking at it there is "brush wear" meaning parts have to be monitored and replaced once in a while, I'm trying to make my VAWT very low maintenance.

Could I not replace the "connection" with something like gallium? a liquid metal at 29 degrees C, whilst still being able to conduct current fine. Wouldnt need a huge quantity of it either, just enough to fill the chamber...

 

[Nidum]

Properly designed slip rings can be very efficient .

Tell us more about your design ideas .

 

[Jimmerding]

Properly designed slip rings can be very efficient .

Tell us more about your design ideas .

Well, it involves taking elements/ideas from direct drive turbines, magnetic bearing generators and contra rotation generators. imagine one tall squirrel cage style turbine (at this stage, just imagine the cylinder with the blades,nothing else), suspended by magnetic bearings so that minimal wind power is needed to turn it and it carries on spinning for a significant amount of time even after a gust of wind has blown. I would be aiming for overkill magnetic bearings using relatively cheap neodymium magnets to "lock" the spinning turbines in place and correct any buck/sway from strong winds.

I then split that in half through the middle,so you've essentially got 2 squirrel cages on top of each other. Rotate the blades to face the opposite way, and ideally,you would have 2 turbines spinning much the same speed in the opposite way from each other. Now imagine inside the cylindrical squirrel cage, you had an ultra light weight frame attached to each turbine, one houses your stator coils etc, the other houses your magnets and such like. Obviously I need a slip ring set up that allows for an element of pitch/pivot as well as spin - as mentioned before, there will be sway and wobble in strong winds using magnetic bearings. This slip ring set up would allow contra rotation of generator parts directly attached to the turbine. I feel that whilst VAWT have their efficiency flaws, what with half the blades working somewhat against the blades being pushed against by wind, this design would create fairly high relative RPM.

This design is still completely in my head / scribbled on a few bits of paper. for all I know, electro magnets might be a better system for the bearings as you could increase the pull on a certain spot to correct any wobbling, but that would make it a far more complicated design... Do you have any ideas?