Revolutionary Wind Turbine Magnetic Gear

One senior design project is the development of a prototype for a revolutionary magnetic gear for a wind turbine. This gear will be particularly useful in off shore environments. The inherent overload protection and non-contact transmission of torque are seen as keen advantages over mechanical gearboxes in applications where the gearbox is installed remotely and would be difficult and/or expensive to access for preventative maintenance or repair. In this project the students designed and built the prototype for a power transmission system coupling a wind turbine to a generator through magnetic gearing. The student working on the project were Christopher Conway, Brandon Eanes, Joshua Kadel, Jarad Osterhus, and Nicholas Wiegold.

See the initial testing of the prototype: