Currently in CEC 112, we are doing a semester long project creating a miniature wind turbine and doing various experients revolving around it. This includes measuring its power output, changing the blade material and angle, and much more. Typically, the class will learn a program vital to engineering on Tuesday's, such as Matlab, Python, or html, and apply it to the wind turbine experiment. For instance, Matlab was just recently tought to the class a few weeks ago, and it is now used to measure the power output of the turbine.
The most recent experiment performed with this turbine was about finding different important measurements of the potential blade materials of balsa wood, cardboard, and styrofoam. These measurements were the material's mass, density, volume, power output, and flexion. It was found that styrofoam was the best material of the three in these categories because it produced the most power, while being the least massive and dense. It did, however, have the most volume, which likely contributed to its higher power generation.
So far, our team has discovered that, as stated previously, styrofoam is the most effective material to be used as a blade. Along with this, we also found that the optimal angle for a blade is around 15 degrees. These are all of the conclusions that have been reached so far, however, there are many more experiments to conduct and much more information to find.
