Saving Raptors, One Windmill at a Time

Overview

Objectives/Goals Many birds are dying in the Altamont pass from the wind turbines. Wind turbines are getting so large that birds must fly very high to pass by them without being injured. Our goal was to generate the same amount of power with a smaller blade set. Methods/Materials Using simulations of vortexes created by the windmill we designed our own blade set. Our design has blades on different planes instead of just one plane. Three blade designs are currently used because the vortex created by one blade can cause the following blade to slow if it is too close. By setting the blades in different planes, we believe that the vortexes will then help the blades spin faster instead of slowing the rotation of the windmill. And, by using many smaller blades, the area that the birds may hit is decreased. Results Our new blade design generated almost three times what the traditional blade set generated. Conclusions/Discussion The distance between the layers of blades in the design still needs to be optimized, but based on the initial results we believe that the design is superior to that which is currently in use. With good placement of these windmills the deaths of birds might be reduced.

Competition history

• CSEF 2013 Aerodynamics/ Hydrodynamics (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0101

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Physics and Astronomy projects
• CSEF Physics and Astronomy projects
• Every CSEF 2013 project