I would prefer not to cut off the spikes with a diode or such.... That would waste energy...
The windturbine is a thing called a WINDSAVE. It is quite rubbish. It costs around £2200 new - I got it for free as a friend dumpped it as it used more power than it produced. The grid tied inverter was very very poorly designed and built, and sucked electricity in standby mode. The turbine also needed 12m/s windspeeds to generate the 1.2kw it promiced, and then it shut down at 14m/s windspeeds! My average windspeed is 5m/s which produces around 60 volts. During any single day I go from zero volts to around 120 volts. I have not logged 150 volts yet, but based on projections and my historic wind data I will get periods of 150 volts.
Essentially I replaced the grid tied inverter with a Mastervolt inverter. I added a voltage restrictor to limit the voltage to 150 volts as this is the max the mastervolt unit can take.
I ran some samples of the voltages produced vs windspeed, and they corelated nicely day to day - ie a set wind speed always produced a set voltage give or take 10%. I ran this against my year long wind data and figured out I would only ever produce electricity with the WINDSAVE for about 38 hours a year, as it requires 250 volts to start generating electricity!
However, for about 4600 hours a year it would produce voltages between 42 and 150, which is where the Mastervolt inverter comes in - it is optimised for that range.
I believe there may be a flaw in the wind turbine itself, as the voltage produced seems to occilate in a range of around 30 volts, not in any descernable pattern, but hell of a random regularily. ie it is not cyclical or such - the logger is one reading per second, so I may be missing it, but I can not see any pattern.
I dont want to cut off the high voltage spikes, as the range inside which the occilation occurs changes with windspeed, I want to try remove the spikes and smooth the voltage so that the voltmaster can do its job.
Since replacing the WINDSAVE inverter with the mastervolt, I have generated 5 units of electricity in two days. In the three weeks I had the 'official' windsave inverter plugged in I generated 0.1 unit of electricity. If I can get a smoother voltage I will get more from the mastervolt inverter, as it will stop trying to adapt itself to the changing voltage every few seconds.
I remembered long ago in the mists of time that a AC to DC converter was able to smoothe the sawtooth voltage produced after the current had passed through the diodes using a capacitor. It sortof stored the spikes and released the energy in the troughs. I was hoping to effect a similar circut.
Bottom line is I dont have a huge budget, and I would like to get this thing working better than it is.