A cup anemometer using 3D additive manufacturing

Renewable energy and wind power have proven to be suitable, clean and abundant to produce electricity. To implement a wind system or plant it is necessary to know the wind potential of the place, this is obtained from the historical data of wind speed. These measurements take a long time and generate significant costs for the project.In this paper, a low-cost cup anemometer was designed and fabricated using 3D additive manufacturing. The design of the anemometer was modeled using ANSYS. The fabrication of the anemometer used additive manufacturing of a hexagonal mechanical structure with ABS material. The structure was coupled to an encoder, which through a phototransistor measures anemometer rotation using PWM pulses. Electronic and data processing uses an Arduino Uno, which receives the data of pulses from the phototransistor and converts them in wind speed data.Finally, several tests to the built anemometer were performed to assess the precision and accuracy of the device compared with a commercial anemometer, showing a R2=0.968 compared to the actual data, furthermore, the cost of the designed anemometer is around 100.00 USD.The manufactured anemometer has good accuracy, low-cost and it is possible to manufacture on a large scale. It is intended to use this type of anemometer for assessment studies, this will reduce costs in the implementation of future wind projects in the country.