Materials Design

By:

Introduction

Our research project is to find out which kind of material for wind turbine blade would work best, aluminum foil or cardboard. Our question is “Which kind of material would fit best for wind turbine blades? “Our hypothesis is that aluminum foil is going to work better and create more energy than cardboard. Our independent variable is to get different kinds of material to use for the wind turbine and our dependent variable is to check which materials creates more amounts of energy. A wind turbine in St. Mary’s would bring down the cost of electricity, which helps the people of the community to save more money.


Materials
cardboard (4pieces)
aluminum foil
wind turbine stand
generator
4 dowels per design
hot glue gun and glue sticks


Procedure:

1.  Get Material
2.  cut out four cardboard turbine blades                                                                               

 3.  Hot glue cardboard turbine blades to the dowels
4.  put the turbine blades on the hub
5.  install the hub on to generator stand
6.  hook up Pasco data sensors
7.  test the cardboard blades four different times
8.  save the Pasco data to the computer
9.  make four aluminum foil turbine blades                                                                              

 10.  Hot glue aluminum foil turbine blades to the dowels
11.  put the turbine blades to the hub
12.  install the hub on to generator stand
13.  hook up Pasco data sensors
14.  test the aluminum foil blades four different times
15.  save the Pasco data to the computer


Background Research:  Windmills in antiquity-  the Greek engineer named Heron of Alexandria in 1st century. Alex invented the windmill.

We’re studying about wind turbines materials. There are different materials in wind turbine blades, like the bone, skin, layers, and wires, and gel-coat. This is going to be a fun project in my opinion because of all the mechanical stuff that’s going on.





Data Table

Discussion of Results





Conclusion

•    What variable has the greatest impact on power output?
•  What type of blades worked best at low speeds? High speeds? Were they the same types blades?
•  What numbers of blades worked best?
•  What shapes worked the best?
•  What length worked the best?
•  What problems did you encounter?
•  What is the impact of quality of construction?
•  Did the materials got really bendy when they got longer - was this a
problem?
•  What happened when the wind turbine blades were bigger than the fan?

The reason why we want wind turbines out here homes is so we can save coal, gases, and other liquids that give people electricity to keep there house’s going and save more money, but we still to pay the company what they did for building the wind turbines.


Ideas for future research- you can change wind speed by moving the turbine away from the fan or turning the fan lower.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Nick Long for his time and effort to make the stand for the turbine, Mr. Bahnsen for the drill bits and some of the materials, Mr. Wood-gate for helping us out with the project, and Mr. Herbert for helping us get the materials and encouragend everybody to do good.

Work Cited:

http://www.gurit.com/breakdown-of-a-turbine-blade.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/windturbinedesign.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/windmills.