Capturing Wind Energy

Overview

Objectives/Goals Objective: To understand how to build the most efficient windmill. The focus will be to change the windmill blade angles and measure the change in the number of rotations per minute without changing other variables, such as wind speed. Methods/Materials Materials: - Home made windmill. Started with a tinker toy prototype and modified it to build a test windmill (tinker toy hub, bass wood blades, clamp supports, and rotation counter) - Wind tunnel (box fan and foam board tunnel) Method: The blade angle was adjusted to 5 different settings (0, 30, 45, 60, and 90 degrees) on the test windmill. At each blade angle setting, the windmill was tested in the wind tunnel for a minute. The number of rotations was recorded for each setting. Five data sets were collected for each blade angle. The tests were run at two wind speeds. The data was recorded and reviewed. Results Testing showed that the most efficient blade angle was at 30 degrees. At 45 and 60 degrees the windmill worked, but not as well. At 0 and 90 degrees, the windmill did not work. Conclusions/Discussion I learned that there is an optimum blade angle for windmill operation, and my optimum blade angle was 30 degrees. Although this is the best angle for my windmill, further testing may show that the best setting is a little less or more than 30 degrees (I could not precisely test these angles with my windmill.) I also learned that changing wind speeds did not change the best angle. From this it is seen that the correct blade angle at low wind speed can perform better than a less efficient blade angle at high wind speeds.

Awards (1)

• First Place

Competition history

• CSEF 2015 Aerodynamics/ Hydrodynamics (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0116

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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