Gear Design

By:

Wind Turbine Project

Introduction

Our research project is about testing different gear ratios, and how many gears it would take to produce more energy on a wind turbine. The question we are asking is, “How many gears it would take, and what is the ratio of the gear teeth would it take to create more volts of energy?” The hypothesis is that the more gears and the higher the ratio, the more volts of energy will be of the gears created. The independent variable is that we are going to change and the ratio of the gears. The dependent variable is to see how much energy can be produce with different hub designs it is using. The controls are that the blade design, the materials and the hub are going to stay the same. It is important because wind turbines may reduce the electricity bills in St. Mary’s AK.

Materials:

hub

4 turbine blades

gear base

wind turbine base

generator

dowel rods

hot glue gun

razor

cardboard

pasco meter

gears (all sorts of sizes)

gearbox

tools

fan box

Procedure:

1. get gears and tools
2. attach wind turbine blades to hub
3. attach hub to generator base(no gears)
4. hook up Pasco data sensor
5. run test for turbine blade for 30 sec.
6. save data or Pasco data sensor
7. run 3 more tests with no gears
8. run test for turbine blade for 30 sec. with a simple 2 gear system
9. save data or Pasco data sensor
10. run 3 more tests with a simple two gear system

Background Research:

When the blades spin it causes the drive shaft to spin, it turns and rotates the coils in the generator. The generator will work only when there is force applied to the drive shaft. To get the generator to spin faster, they use gears with multiple numbers of teeth. The gears give the wind turbines a mechanical advantage; this means that they multiply it by a forceful power of the blades. Using a large gear on the drive shaft and a small gear on the generator, which brings up the rpm’s (revolutions per minute), does this. If a gear has a ratio of 500:5, that is, for every five revolutions of the larger gear, it would make the generator spin 500 times in a circle rotation. A large commercial wind turbine nacelle (the generator Housing) can weigh up to 55 tons or even more. They are thinking to put wind turbines in Saint Mary's, but the people that are building the wind turbines need to find a good spot to put them. If something goes wrong with the turbines, it could be a disaster. The community of Saint Mary’s could be a good spot because; saint Mary’s get enough wind to power the wind turbines. Wind turbines would help out because it would reduce the usage of diesel fuel in this town. It would reduce the carbon in the air and the wind turbines would help by reducing the diesel usage in Saint Mary’s. We think the wind out here in Saint Mary’s would be great for the wind turbines. With the wind we get it would probably spin the blades 24/7.

Data Table:

Discussion of results:

No-Gear Trial I-

When we tested our first trial, we didn’t use any gears or gearbox for our wind turbine. We had tested it four times and the graphs below shows the results that we obtained. The first time we tried testing the hub without gears and gearbox and we had produced enough volts of energy spin to the generator but it did not provide as much energy as we expected it to. We used our fan blades to get the results for our test. The lowest amount of electricity created was .419 voltages and the highest amount of electricity was .573 volts but the average amount of electricity was.471 volts that’s what we got when we tested the wind turbine with no gears.

Trial II-

The second test, We used the hub and generator with our gears during the second experiment. We put a bigger gear attached to the hub and a smaller gear attached to the generator. The results we got from the geared hub produced way more volts of electricity. The reason is because we had used the big gear, which has more many teeth than the smaller gear. The smaller gear is forced to spin faster because the smaller gear has less teeth and that makes the big gear have a lot of advantage for making it spin faster. The lowest amount of electricity created 0.806 volts, the average amount of electricity created is 0.96 volts, and the highest amount of electricity created was 1.146 volts.

Discussion of Results electricity created:

The data table shows how much electricity was converted from the different uses of our hub, fan, and gearbox/no gearbox reactions. We used different sizes of gears to see which one would produce the highest amount of electricity.

Conclusion:

When we tested the wind turbine without gears we weren't getting as much voltage but when we tested it with a simple two gear system we were getting more than 1 volt of energy. When we first started to think about what to use for holding the gears we thought that we would be using a gearbox but it turned out to be defective, so we changed the design to use without the gearbox and instead used cardboard box to keep the shaft in place. When we start the KIDwind challenge we will update our wind turbine and make it better.

Ideas for future research:

We could find out more about where they are planing to put a wind turbines, what kind of turbines, how much, and where are they going to be put in Saint Mary’s. The community wants to bring wind energy facilities here it is going to be put it in between Saint Mary’s and Pitka’s Point. Not only that, but is there going to be enough energy to run our town, so the cost of the wind turbines worth would be it.

Acknowledgments:

We would like to thank all these people for our wind turbine project; nick for building the basse, and our science teacher, Mr. Woodgate. Without the help from these people, we would not have gotten this far. All the students that are doing projects appreciate and thank all of you who helped us and used your work time to help us out on our project.

Work Cited:

www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi

www.google.com

www.kidwind.com