This is the beginning test of a full size poured stator.  I've done some small ones in the past for stirling engine projects but never really followed up on them.   Bob Gayle inspired me to follow up on it to see if would really perform equally as well as a steel slotted stator.  Initial tests are showing some losses over the steel core but with the ease of fabricating it may well be worth the efficiency loss over labor involved with the steel slotted cores.  Here is a picture of the poured core stator ....

To keep it simple I used fiberglass resin as the binder and mixed in the iron powder.  It was basically a paste when mixed.  There is about 5 pounds of iron powder in this stator.  Actually, very little resin was needed to saturate all the particals, guessing at around 6 oz.  The slots are .46 deep and .3 wide for 14 turns of #15 wire through 36 slots.  There will be 12 magnets used on this one.   I plan to test the unit with both ceramic 5 magnets and neodymium type.   Ceramics are nice in the sense there is little to no cogging effict but I don't expect the cogging of the neo's will be bad enough to hurt performance much. 

Below is a picture of the stator completed with all its windings....

The next one shows the stator just as it was being finished with the 3rd phase.  Notice the special clamp for getting the last phase in place.  Typically the last phase goes in sort of free hand, but, because of the wire size used in this one this is near impossible.  The clamp holds snug to the stator core and allows you to wind the wire without having to use all 12 fingers on each hand

The initial tests proved that this unit would work but at less efficiency than the steel strips.  I suppose the efficiency loss is a fair trade off for labor.   The unit has 12 poles using the 1.5" round neo's.  12 turns per coil and 12 coils per phase ( 36 coils total ), Each phase came in at .3 ohms.   #15 wire was used for some fair power.  Because of the low turns of wire the rpm per volt came in fairly high which would require a fairly good size prop to drive it.   An 8 ft prop designed to run at around a TSR of 8 would work quite nicely making arount 650 watts of power in a 28mph wind.  Not to bad for a small 8 inch unit.

I plan to do some brief testing with some ceramic magnets cut from the large rings I sell in the "builders corner" of this site under products.   I'm sure it won't be a potent as the neo's but something I have to give a shot.   This will increase the magnet area considerably so the loss shouldn't be drastic.....