Electronics and blades made in Africa

Finally we moved in our new room on Friday. We worked really hard to clean the whole room, although the craftsmen tried to wipe out all the paint on the floor with evil acid. But we cleaned everything and we are happy to have a new home.

Our project is going on very well as well.

At the beginning of the week we met John, a worker for Nkong who constructed one of the windmills at the university of Dschang together with our project partner Tangka. The construction of the turbine and to find the material is very easy, he told us. The main problem was the short lifetime of the critical parts of the wind turbine. The first reason was that they used really old bearings, which has been already destroyed before they used them for the turbine. But another reason was that the blades and other parts of the turbine weren’t constructed and carved accurately so there was big unbalance, which of course shortens the life of the whole plant. So we will have to deal with this problem and encourage our craftsmen to work very carefully.

 But there have been some progresses as well last week. We managed to get the first electronic circuit “Made in Africa” in order to transform the 12V Battery voltage to an voltage which is usable in ordinary fluorescent bulbs. This is a very important step for the project, since the villagers won´t be very happy about the energy we brought them as long as there are no possibilities to use it. Unfortunately I forgot to tell the electrician that the circuit should consume as less electricity as possible. So the device consumes about 200 Wattage – 5 times as much as a usual bulb. So we have to amend it a little bit.

To get the wood for the blades we went to the local wood dealer. We found a super piece of wood without any branches for 15€ - half of the price was actually the white man bonus, a fact we discovered later. But we can build 6 blades out this piece. So we feel comfortable by using tropical wood (since we are in the tropics), since we can almost carve 100 blades out of one big rain forest tree.

On Saturday we attended the Meeting of MUDECA, in order to present our project and the next steps. It was an overall fruitful and successful meeting. After we presented our proposed model to the delegates they fired many questions on us regarding the possibilities and constraints of the turbines. The delegates already solved the problems regarding the interviewer for our questionnaire, the “raw” selection of the craftsmen and they even got an idea of how to finance the demonstration site. We are really lucky that we found such encouraged people who really want to change something for their own people.

We are looking forward to a new week. We will try to get the rest of the material for the demonstration site and the container.

         Best regards

                   Johannes

Dieser Eintrag wurde am 3.9.2008 um 11:23 verfasst und befindet sich in project reports from Cameroon, english blog. Sie können alle Antworten zu diesem Eintrag über den Feed RSS 2.0 mitverfolgen. Hinterlassen Sie eine Antwort oder einen Trackback-Link zu Ihrer eigenen Homepage.

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