Megawatt scale HAWT grid-tie windparks are operating at optimum height in specific areas, with strong and mostly continuous winds. This makes their development, construction and maintenance very labor- and resource-intensive projects and causes much inflexibility in the process of finding a suitable location for deployment and operation.

Zephyr, named after the greek god of the West-Wind, is the concept of a small-scale and modular DIY Wind-Harvesting-System, designated to work in low-wind areas, keeping sustainability, efficiency, resilience and safety in mind.

Benefits of many small turbines instead of a few big ones:

• Redundancy: Failure of a big turbine has more impact than a single small turbine of a group
• Scalability: Park can grow with more available resources and higher consumption demands
• Reality: It's easier to build small turbines without specialized machines or cranes to put them up

This shall become a draft of common agreements on design principles and common interfaces to keep modularity and development diversity on a high level.

mechanics

All VAWT's seem to have a bad reputation when it comes to conversion efficiency. The most commonly known VAWT's are the Darrieus and Savonius types. However, there are alternative ideas for the vertical axis, like Larry Dobson's involute wind turbine or the C-Rotor concept, which has the advantage of being tested and developed by a strong community.

rotors

generators

smartgrid

electronics

We want to make small-scale wind technology available to everyone, so that more people can experiment with this technology. TiVA, the Tiny Vertical Axis project is aiming to give people a very modular but complete small-scale VAWT to try out new technologies.

tiva