HY-1000 blade failure....cause & solutions?

Hey everyone,

I posted a video to YouTube on this and I've chatted with some of you already on this, but thought I would post this here to both expand the 'brain trust' and hopefully add to the knowledge base for future users...

'Just ordered and received directly from HY-Energy (HYE) in China their new & improved HY-1000L 1kw 24v turbine. I've been using an earlier version of the HY-1000 for over a year with good results...so I decided to add a second HY-1000 to my stem.

According to the HYE, this new model has an improved/redesigned generator that can handle a newer, larger blade they are selling with it. Whereas the old blades are about 33" long, the new ones are 37.5" long, creating about the same swept area as the WN Windgrabbers. Their shape/curvature is also very different, and the newer blades are wider at most points as well. I'll post some comparison pics later.

In any case, I installed the new turbine with the new, longer blades and the initial results were impressive. These new blades start moving in maybe 2-3mph and really get cranking nicely when the winds pick up as you can see in this video I took a couple of hours after installing it:



Well fortunes quickly changed. We had some nasty winds come through, with some peak gusts in the high 60s to maybe low 70s. I was away from home and unable to manually brake the turbine, which I'm not sure I would have done anyway since the blades are supposedly rated to 110mph, and according to HYE marketing materials, the blades have 'aerodynamic braking':
Blade aerodynamic braking:
In high wind speed conditions, patent pending blades will generate a reverse reluctance torque, so that the blade efficiency falls and the blade rotation speed starts to decline. With the continuing reluctance torque, blade rotation speed is limited to a certain range to prevent damage to the wind turbine blades.

Well, the wind blew and the blades failed, as I discuss a little in this video:



I'm working with HYE and they have been very responsive so far, and I believe they will replace the blades. But without knowing how this happened, I'm obviously reluctant to put them back on.

HYE has suggested that my tower was wobbling and that perhaps this vibration imbalanced the blades, leading to problems. I'll admit my 2" sched 80 pipe tower isn't the greatest, but it's pretty solid and guyed tight...I don't think there's a whole lot of movement there.

Here's the grid-tie configuration I was using with this turbine:



Today I put a WN Windgrabber hub/3-blade set on this turbine and hooked everything up and the SunG is working fine. I even had some gusts today that briefly pushed the SunG into overvolt and warmed up the coils a bit.

I will say that on the day of the failure I was monitoring the output remotely with my TED 5000 unit, and several times the output zeroed out, which I'm assuming meant some overvolting/dumping. One of these several minutes, which makes we wonder whether the culprit is my dump load configuration. Should the resistance of the dump load be such that the braking would be severe enough to slow the RPMs down quickly enough so that the overvolt period would be brief, not several minutes?

Maybe I need a larger/different dump load configuration? Wouldn't you want to err on the side of too much load rather than too little...???

Or maybe it's something else entirely. But I obviously don't want to make this mistake twice

Prairiewind

 

If you do not have a low enough resistance on your dump load it will not slow the turbine. But on the other hand. If it is too low it will draw enough current to fry the relay in the GTI.
That is why I use the VCS-1H and a Heavy Duty Continuous relay for my dump.
I also had to try a few different configurations on the dump loads. With 600 watts at 24 volts. They got hot fast at 25+ mph and did not slow my turbine. At 900 watts at even 30 mph and the GTI shut off it will slow it down.
So that is what I run now.You want them to be a little warm but not get hot to the touch.
The more resistors you run in parallel the lower the resistance and closer to a braking condition you get.
If you set the switch to trip just short of the GTI max voltage. These switches only go to 60 volts. Set to like 50 volts. When it trips you will still be making some power. Because the dump is separate from the GTI.

 

Found the switch even cheaper.
http://www.solarseller.com/dc_photoswitch__dc_timer__voltage_controlled_switch_dc_relay.htm
only $78 instead of 100-135 dollars.

 

FYI...some additional information to put on the table. Here are some screenshots from the day of the blade breakage:

 

Also...here as some photos of the new (37.5") blades shipping with the new turbine compared to the "old" (33") ones of earlier HY-1000s:
















(new HY-1000 hub/blades on bottom; WN WindGrabber blades on top)

 

I received a lengthy response back from HYE, part of which I'm sharing below (italicized). I must say I'm really impressed with their customer service both before and after the sale. I exchanged at least a dozen e-mails with them before the sale as I was deciding between buying another HY-1000 or a 1.5kw or may 2kw model instead. Certainly I wasn't going to be a huge sale for them either way, but they are clearly motivated to do more in the US market and I relayed some of the ideas/concerns sometimes discussed in this forum. FYI: the 'screenshots' they are referring to are the ones I posted earlier in this thread.

They have offered to replace all the blades at their cost, but obviously this makes no sense if this will happen again. One obvious solution would be to just use a set of the "old" smaller blades on the new turbine, which seem to be safe from this. But it would be nice to be able to use the larger, more powerful blades if possible...

Regarding the SunG inverter you use, we know few about it because we never tested, from the introduction I found they mentioned there is dumpload and high wind protection, but we are not sure when and at what voltage the dumpload and high wind protection start to work. Since the new 1kw is redesigned, so the rotor is more powerful, and also the voltage at different speed is also different from previous model, so we assume at high wind condition, the old turbine is well controlled by the SunG inverter but not for the new wind turbine.

2.Here I would like to let you know more about HYE wind turbine control, there is a dumpload and overvoltage braking integrated into our wind turbine controller, the wind turbine voltage varies with the wind speed, so we preset the dumpload voltage point and overvoltage braking point on controller (the voltage point setting is base on our wind turbine bench and actual environment testing). You must know well how the dumpload works, for the overvoltage braking, means when the wind speed is around 16-17m/s (cut out wind speed), wind turbine voltage generated is higher than overvoltage braking point (normally for 24 off-grid system its 29-30V, for the one you use 24V on-grid system, we need to test with the inverter to find the best overvoltage braking point), from the screenshot we found that the wind turbine is still generating power at around 20m/s wind speed, which means the overvoltage braking system is not working at all, so the wind turbine is running out of control in such wind speed, the rated RMP of 1kw wind turbine new model is around 750, but when the rotor is out of control in 20-25m/s wind speed, the RPM could reach up to 1200-1300, and also create huge vibration and resonance with your guyed tower structure which broke the blade in storm.

3.Above mentioned overvoltage braking is to give a constant 200-300 times 3 phase shortcut circuit brake when wind turbine operating in high wind and reach it’s braking point, the rotor will gradually slow down by the electromagnetic resistance inside the generator, once the wind turbine is on the braking mode, the blade will also spin at around 100-200RPM (a very safe RPM range) under extreme wind, this is what we mentioned 110mph survival wind speed, but surely it should be under electromagnetic control and aerodynamic stalling. If the wind turbine is complete out of control, then even with blade aerodynamic stalling, the rotor still cannot be controlled.

4.The new blade material, thickness and structure, noise level are much better than the old blade, I think you see it yourself from the appearance, from the tension force test, the new blade is about 180kg for each blade, but the old blade is around 120kg, so there is no way the new blade could break in high wind but the old blade survived.

5.Sorry about such problem happened, I thought the SunG inverter works quite well with the old wind turbine, so it should be working fine with the new wind turbine, but after discussing with our technician, we found high wind protection system could not work well with the new wind turbine because the new blade is too powerful (just let you know the inside generator is also redesigned in order to match better with the new blade). We will provide replacement of all broken blades on HYE cost but I am afraid the new blade will break again if we don’t improve the high wind protection of SunG inverter, so I think the best way would be either use controller of HYE provided, or we talk to SunG inverter and find the correct overvoltage braking point for the new wind turbine. But back to the massive sales of wind turbine selling in U.S, we still need a UL or ETL certified inverter, so you can cell it legally in bigger quantity. So far we have a good 1.5kw grid-tie inverter with VDE certificate selling very well in Europe but no ETL certificate. But we have a 3kw inverter with UL approval working very well with our HY-3000 wind turbine (about 13-15kwh/day at 5m/s average wind speed), I think this could be a perfect solution.

 

Tom,
Can you post or email me a diagram of your switch and relay setup?
Will the dump loader in the sun g have the umph to drive a DC relay off a starter solenoid?

 

It needs a separate power source. I use a 12 volt small tractor battery with a wall power supply to keep it charged.
I posted the diagram on this site.
http://www.windynation.com/communit...nd-power-outage-safety-system.1016/#post-6045
The switch is at the bottom.
But it is wired.
Big Terminals left to right.
#1 To the solenoid it is normally open contact.
#2 To the power source for the relay. I used the 12 volt battery.
#3 Nothing on it. It is the normally closed contact.

Left to right on screw terminals. Mine came with a jumper on the last two terminals. REMOVE IT.

#1 ground wire to battery.
#2 empty
#3 12 volts from positive on the battery.
#4 Sense voltage line. Run to positive on GTI.

My relay is a 4 terminal relay.
The switch comes with a manual with a few setups. I also submitted my setup to them to add last year. Do not know if they did. At the time they said they were not sure if it would work and they would not warranty it. It was not one of the recommended applications. I tried to use it with out the heavy duty relay and fried the relay on the board.. Cost $6.00 for a new relay and then I used it as a slave to trigger the heavy duty relay. Have not had a problem since.

Heavy Duty Relay- 12 volt
2 large for GTI positive to dump resistors.
2 small 1 from switch big terminal and the other a ground from battery.

I use a battery tie. But this should be how to set it up without one.

 

I did not do that because my GTI does not go to dump when power goes out. If it happens and it usually does during a high wind event. POOF goes the GTI from too high voltage.

 

New pictures of Diagram.

 

Forgot one thing. You said you have(2) 1000 watt turbines. If they are on different grid ties. I think you can use a reversed diode connected to each and then connected together. That would be the voltage sense point. If I remember right it will be the highest of the two voltages. That way you could use one voltage controlled switch to trigger two different relays and dump loads. Based on which ever turbine was first to go over the trip voltage.
Correct me if I am wrong Minnesota.

 

Well unfortunately I've had another blade failure with the replacement set of "new and improved" blades I installed after having the 1st set fail as described above. From the records of my wind meter, the highest gust while I was gone was 49-50mph, far less than the likely 70mph gust when the blades broke the first time. The break pattern is nearly identical to the first time they broke however (see below).

Unlike the first time, however I was running an entirely different set up for my grid-tie system. Rather than just a single SunG 1kw 22-60 GTI and 4 x 300w dump load set like I was using the first time, this time I was using two of these 22-60 1kw GTIs "stacked" (in parallel); each of these inverters had its own 3 ohm/1500w 22-60v dump load resistor (like this one selling on ebay), a resistor that the seller claims was developed specifically for use with the SunG 22-60 GTI.

Also, the 1st time the blades failed my GTI "blew" as well. This time both GTIs are still running just fine. And both of their dump load resistors also appear to be working just fine.

Finally, my "old" HY-1000--mounted about 10' away (but about 3' lower) than my "new" HY-1000--did not have any issues with its blades (either the 1st time or this time), although its nosecone was destroyed this time when (presumably) one of the broken blades flew off and smashed it.

I'm not sure what to do at this point. After the 1st failure, the HY Energy technicians suggested that rather than the 4 x 300w dump load I was using (on only a single SunG inverter), that I use 8 x 300w instead. Well here I had two 1000w GTIs running with a combined 3000w of dump load, but that still wasn't enough to brake these blades down enough to keep them from (apparently) spinning out of control.

I installed a backup set of 3 x WN "Windgrabbers," but they don't perform nearly as well as the HY-Energy blades did...the Windgrabbers get spinning in very low wind, but they don't get up to nearly as high an RPM as the HY-Energy blades. I'd imagine that installing a set of 5 of the "old style" HY-Energy blades (discussed above) would probably be the best bet at this point unless I figure out some way to "brake" these new blades more effectively.

These "new" blades are definitely serious in terms of wind production, but in high wind-gust areas like mine they appear to be too risky at this point--at least without a different GTI/grid-tie system with some different braking method available...

 

That is why I have mine brake separately at a lower voltage. So it will lower the rpms during gusts. The resistor they sold me at 3 ohms allowed the turbine to increase in speed. I run both mine at 2 ohms and it slows the turbines down. At 3 ohms the rpms went up during a power failure.
Also the GTI's can NOT handle sudden gusts and the turbine WILL over speed. We are talking getting slammed with 15-30 mph increases.
That is why I have a separate switch.
Also while running 3 ohms it was the first time in 2 years that I burnt up a wind GTI.
Also are you tightening the bolts to specs ?
Those blades will not take any over torquing.

 

I don't have a torque wrench so I'm not sure on the over-torquing.

But again my "old" HY-1000 with it's "older" (smaller) blades have been just fine through both of the gusts/storms that destroyed these new blades. Granted the "old" HY-1000/blades are mounted on a tower about 2-3' lower than the nearby "new" HY-1000 so it is getting slightly lower winds, but I can't imagine that much lower. So whatever is happening with the GTIs, the dump loads, etc., is only created a problem when the "new" larger/longer blades are in the picture.

So what is the high-end voltage you have your system/switch set up to brake at?

 

Right now I am running a split system. The Low voltage one is 28 volts. The high voltage one is 55 volts. That may change as I have not had any good winds since I changed it.
The last good winds were the day the power went out. That day I happened to be home. I got slammed with a 40 mph increase in winds and it shook the house. The power went out at the same time. The quartz dump load lite up my house like I had a sun in my upstairs. I could see it downstairs 2 rooms away. That was that 3 ohm one. And the turbine ran away.
Since then I have a relay hooked to connect it to the dump if power goes down.
And I set my dump resistors back to 2 ohms on each. At 3 ohms it runs away and at 2 ohms it slows down. Even during the big gusts. Also my turbines rarely ever go over 550-600 watts even during gusts to 65 mph here.
Still waiting to see if I burn up the new SSR's they are 5-110 volt 60 amp ones.
As far as over tightening. Your washers are cupped and that would be a sign of over tightening.
I would snug them and give them just about a half a turn. No more than that. All you are trying to do is keep them from wobbling and sliding around. You could damage them and not show any cracks during install.

 

That's good advice on the tightening; I'll definitely be more careful if I use these types of blades again.

So when talk about your 3 ohm "quartz dump load" are you talking about the same one I used (this seller on eBay)? So what exactly did you use when you say you set your dump load resistors back to 2 ohm? Do you mean those green Windy Nation dump coils?

It seems like almost all of the issues I've had with these turbines are related to improperly-sized dump loads that either a. fry the GTI or b. let the blades spin out of control and get damaged. I'm not sure why it's so hard to get it right on the dump load sizing, but it's an expensive trial and error process. Is there a more foolproof/forgiving dump load option than these resistor coils that will provide me with more reliable protection?

 

I also want to clarify the blade bolt tightening.
1/2 turn after snug with fine thread and 1/4 turn if coarse thread after snug.
Right and right.
Originally they sent me a 5 ohm one and it did nothing to slow the turbine down. The EXPERTS said it would work. Then the sent me a 3 ohm one and it slowed the turbine. But when I got stronger winds the turbine took off and lite the thing up. If it had been more than 30 secs and the heat shied was not there. A fire may have resulted.
I had been running the ones Windy Nation sells.
In a 3 ohm configuration they get hot. In a 2 ohm configuration they do not. They slow the turbine and keep it there so they do not heat up. Even in the worst situation they get warm to the touch. Now this is for 500 watt turbine. If you have a 1000 watt you will have to experiment.
Also even when the turbines are shorted. I do have 6 gauge 40 ft of wire on them. At approximately 25-30 mph even in a shorted configuration the blades will start spinning real fast. That is why I have a dump on them. The closer you short them out to the tower. If you have good blades I believe the turbine will turn into an induction heater and melt.
Correct me if I am wrong guys and girls.

 

And maybe rather than more gambling with dump loads it's worth looking at furling options...I just don't see how the "unibody" HY units could be easily modified for furling. 'Too bad you can't buy just the HY PMA and install it with the WN furling vane/kit mount...might be the perfect solution. Or maybe just buy the Windtura 750 in the first place, although I'd like to see some head-to-head data on the 750 versus the HY...Larry has both and I think feels that the HY is more productive...

 

Actually Mike Windmill shop is selling a vertical furling unit that you could mount the turbine generator on. Looks like a stout unit. Look under whats new.I do not know if he will sell separately.
Furling will work if you do not have violent wind direction changes. Blue Jay has had his share of problems with this. If you do the vertical unit might work well.
If you do not have violent wind shifts then buy a mount from Windy Nation and give it a try. Talk to Josh about it. I have too much turbulence here and can not put mine any higher up.

 

Can not comment too much about Powermax aka Windmax aka Skymax. I have been around for all three names of this unit. But alot of people like them.