29 August 1985 Windpump technology developed

Inner Mongolia's famous fat-tail sheep are among the livestock grazing grasslands one thousand metres above sea level in this Chinese autonomous region benefiting from windpump technology developed by agricultural engineers at Lincoln College on the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand.

Seemingly there would be little New Zealand could teach the Chinese who were using windpumping for irrigation 500 years ago in the Ming
Dynasty - but refinement of the technology is important for them.

And refined windpumping technology is even more important to the thousands of nomadic herdsmen whose stock roam the rich grasslands of this region on China's far northern border.

In recent years Lincoln College has had an interchange of expertise on windpumping with Inner Mongolia.

Ma Shenghong, an Inner Mongolian mechanical engineer, spent two years with the agricultural engineering department at Lincoln College researching windpump systems, and went home earlier this year.

Dick Chilcott, senior lecturer in agricultural engineering at the college, went to China in 1981 for a workshop on water-lifting devices and water management.

The workshop was organised by the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations and the Chinese Government, with support from the U.N. Development Program.

These windpumps needed to be reasonably cheap and reliable, have a long service life and be easy to maintain.

The pumps would be used in many different locations and in different conditions, so the windpumps would need to be a series production .

Ma said that technicians were working on the best type of windmill, and on design for series production.

Traditionally the Chinese windmill for pumping water has been wooden, with canvas sails and the dragon-bone waterlift.

Such windmills were common in China right up until the 1960s, and many are probably still working there.

These windmills. had no direction control, and wind control was achieved by altering the area of the canvas sails.

A 1967 survey showed that nearly 40,000 of these windmills were still being used in coastal areas of Jiangsu Province to drive low-lift waterpumps for irrigation.

Ten years earlier the Chinese Government had realised that new types of deep-well wind-driven machines should be developed for the pastoral regions.

Research started in the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Machinery, and the Research Institute of Livestock Machinery.

This work was into wind-driven power generators as well as wind-driven water-lifting devices.

Tests and research into windpumps began in Inner Mongolia in 1958, and windpumps were found to be more economic than engine-driven or animal driven pumps in places where the annual wind speed was relatively high.

The first of the new generation windmills, known as Model FD8-LB100, was set up in 1958 for further research and testing in the west of Inner Mongolia.

The diameter of the multi-bladed, galvanised steel rotor was eight metres, rated wind speed was eight metres a second, and rated power about one kilowatt.

China's Cultural Revolution interrupted the research, and the study did not resume until 1976.

Since then more than 15 types of windmill have been studied in Inner Mongolia, among these some wind-charging plants.

Some of these windmills have been produced commercially to be sold to the herdsmen, and already hundreds are pumping water on the Inner Mongolian grasslands.

But the Chinese technicians continued to look for the best design of windpump, to better test newer technology in the field, and develop new concepts of windpumping.

Ma is an engineer with the Livestock Machinery Research Institute of the Ministry of Machine Making in the Inner Mongolian capital of Huhehoate. Although traditionally windmills have been used to irrigate crops, usually rice paddies, in China, the Inner Mongolian waterpumping project is not so ambitious.

Present intention is for windpumps to provide water for livestock irrigation may come later.

There are few streams or lakes in the arid northern region of China, so the animals drink groundwater.

Droughts in parts of Inner Mongolia in the last few years have lowered groundwater levels, and most wells are now 20 metres to 100 metres below ground.

The Inner Mongolian herdsmen run horses, cattle, camels, goats and sheep - known there as the five beloved animals.

Herdsmen and their families live in yurts - dome-like wooden- framed tents of felt and move with their herds.

When they have to move on, they load their families and possessions on to oxcarts, and head across the grasslands in a wagon train.

But nomadic herding is giving way to fencing pasture, rotation grazing, and moves to grow better-quality fodder grass, and plant trees to improve the ecological balance.

This change to more settled pastoral farming known as double contracting because households take over responsibility for livestock and
pasture although these are still owned collectively make good windpumping techniques even more imperative.

The grasslands of Inner Mongolia, one of the main grasslands of China with a long history of livestock production, produces meat, milk and
wool.

Annual rainfall, particularly in the drier west of the region, is low.

Mongolians call their land, of 3.4 million people, "mother in a green robe."

The fat-tail sheep, the best breed of the region, are found in Dong Ujimqin banner - the Mongolian term for a county.

Double contracting with a herdsman's household taking over and fencing as much as 20 square kilometres of pastureland - is giving the
herdsmen much more control over their production.

Traditional nomadic production for self-sufficiency is being modernized into commercial production.

Herdsmen's incomes are increasing, pushing up the demand for farm hardware, such as tractors, trucks, fencing and wind or solar-energy generators.

But although there is some doubt that wind-energy generators will become the main electricity source, there is no doubt that windpumping
is becoming well established.

Chinese wind power resources are being surveyed by meteorologists, and the information gained will be used to help design better windmills.

Comparisons with other methods of water lifting show that windpumping is the better economic choice in Inner Mongolia.

The intention is to develop a low-speed windmill with a pull-rod pump, that has only limited capacity but is easy to start at low-wind velocity.

A windpump able to lift water at three to four on the Beaufort wind force scale of 1-12 can be in use for most of the year.

(The Beaufort scale ranges from light air at the bottom to hurricane at the top) .

Three to four on the scale is gentle to moderate wind.

Windmill sail diameters of up to 10 metres could lift water from wells of different depths.

In any one area windmills of different sizes with pull-rod pumps in bores of different diameters, different piston strokes and with good storage capacity could provide adequate drinking water for animals.

Because the windmills are used only for pumping water, the drive-mechanism is simple : the turning sails directly drive by a crank on the shaft the pull-rod of a reciprocating-piston pump.

Such pumps are simple, work easily and can be built at relatively little cost.

Since leaving Lincoln College earlier this year Ma Shenghong has signed a Know-how contract for the inner Mongolian Power Authority to produce wind generators with French Aerowatt technology.

Ma has also been made responsible for establishing a 30-hectare field test site in the grassland of Inner Mongolia, where winds of 5.5 metres a  second blow all year round.

He is seeking advice from Lincoln College on instrumentation for the test site, where wind-generation and wind-pumping systems will be tested and evaluated.

The technology increasingly will have an economic advantage as long as the winds keep blowing over Inner Mongolia.

And as the sails of more and more windmills start turning, the winds of change are improving the social and cultural conditions of the herdsmen.

Further information from Mr Dick Chilcott, Senior Lecturer in Agricultural Engineering, Department of Agricultural Engineering, Lincoln College 8150, Canterbury, New Zealand.