Wind Turbine Competition
As part of the final project for the Renewable Energy course I took at the University of Vermont, a competition sparked to build the best wind turbine from a kit. The wind turbine was propelled by a standard desk fan with three speed settings. The turbine itself had numerous interchangeable blade types all with different pitch angle settings. Cross sectional areas of each blade were determined by 3D scanning each blade and ”slicing” the model. (left) We compared these slices with that of an ideal turbine blade for validation. (right). From these slices we pulled important geometric figures like chord length, thickness, and relative radius. Using a MATLAB code that we wrote up, we were able to iterate through pitch angle, fan speed, and turbine placement to determine the best coefficient of performance and pinpoint an optimized wind turbine combination. With our determined settings we ended up winning second place in the competition!
The full paper of our analyses can be downloaded here: Wind Turbine Optimization
