WIND TURBINE BLOGPOST

Wind Turbine Blogpost

Background: 

There are a few primary concepts a person would have to understand in order to comprehend the way in which my wind turbine functions. A few of the most important ones are ... 

• Electromagnetic Induction: Beneath my wind turbine are loops of wire. Not far away from these coils of wire are the magnets. The bottle is made to spin and the magnets move in and out of the magnetic field, creating a change in the magnetic field. This induces a voltage which can create a current! The current can be used for multiple different things, but in our generator, the current is directed towards trying to light a lightbulb. 
• Torque: Torque is the reason that the wind-turbine rotated! To get a torque, you need a Force and Lever arm. Force and lever arm are inversely proportional meaning that if one goes up, the other goes down. Therefore, we tried to have quite a long lever arm so that we wouldn't need as much force to make the fan blades turn. We used the cut open flaps on the bottle as the lever arms and the force was the wind from the fan. When working together, we got the fan blades to spin! 
• Friction: Friction was something that we had to be aware of in our wind-turbine creation process. Friction is the resistance that one surface of an object encounters when moving on another. To have a well functioning wind turbine, you need to have as little friction as possible. Have a smooth and sleek surface (using sandpaper on wood or cardboard to soften it) can make all of the difference in the speed an object can reach. 

Materials & Methods: 

• An abundance of copper wire (70+ loops per coil)
• Strong magnets (5 or 6 pairs)
• 2 liter soda bottle
• String
• X-Acto knife (& band-aids)
• Cardboard box
• Tape 
• PATIENCE!!!! 
• Circular platform (for bottle to rest on) 

(A and D) This is a picture of the completed wind-turbine. You can clearly see the opened flaps meant to capture the wind.

(B) In this picture you can see the coils of wire beneath the device.

(A and C) In this image you can see a the magnets evenly spaced around the spinning platform. You can also see the opened flaps up close that catch the wind.

Results:

1. We created 0.02 volts and 0.02 amps of current

1. Sadly we were NOT able to generate enough voltage/current to light a lightbulb. I think that this is because our device was a little bit heavy and if it was lighter, it would have been able to move faster and generate more voltage/current.

Discussion: 

I learned a lot from doing this wind turbine project. I think that the most important lesson I learned was to keep the plan very simple. In the beginning, Mark had many ideas with big metal parts and robotics pieces and in all honesty, I felt lost. I wasn't sure if all of these big shiny metal pieces were going to fit together, but because I didn't really understand, I didn't speak up. It was not until the day before the project was due that we realized our design was not going to work. This is when I finally spoke up and introduced the idea of a cardboard box and a much simpler and basic design. This idea worked out WAY better and ran smoothly and we were able to put together an awesome wind-turbine faster than we had ever expected. We didn't generate a whole lot of voltage and this is because of the friction we had along with the magnets not being close enough to the coils of wire. What did work really well were the fan blades and the string suspending the bottle. What I would do differently would be to cut bigger fan blades and have the magnets rotating slightly close to the coils of wire. Overall, I really enjoyed making this wind turbine and it was all worth it to see it spinning in the end!