Blade Design

By:

Wind Turbine Blade Design

By Savanna and Mariah

 

Introduction:

The project that we chose to research is to test which blade shapes will be best for a wind turbine. We have chosen two types of blades shapes to test. We tested a straight blade design and the other design test is square blade designs. Our hypothesis is that a straight blade will create more energy than a square shaped blade these blade shapes are what we want to test for our science fair project. Our independent variable is the blade shape and our dependent variable is the amount of energy created by the wind. This is important  for St. Mary’s because  many people would save money due to lower electricity costs and have more money  for groceries and gas.  

 

Materials

 wind kit

 card board

 super glue

 tape

 paint (blue, red, purple)

 wind turbine stand

 knife

 

procedures:

1. cut out the card board for blade shapes

2. glue the blade design together

3. test each design four times

4. record the results of each test on a pasco machine

5.  create the graph with the data we had recorded

6.  make the poster board

 

Background research

 

A wind turbine would have a huge affect on the city of Saint Mary’s because it will save people money. One wind turbine could create lots of energy for houses. A wind turbine extracts energy from the wind to create power for houses. The wind turbine of Heron in Alexandria is one of the first known instances of a wind  powering machine in history.

Small wind turbines can be used to create energy for schools, clinics and places that do not have an electric grid. The worlds largest wind turbine has an axis of 160 meters above ground and the rotor tips reachs a hight of 205 meters and is the only turbine that is taller than 200 meters. The name of this wind turbine is the Fuhrlander wind turbine in Laasow  Germany.

 

 

		sample 1	sample 2	sample 3	sample 4	average
straight blade		0.201	0.209	0.21	0.206	0.207
square blade design		0.214	0.214	0.20	0.214	0.211

 

 

As you can see on the graph above for the straight blade test our highest was 0.201 and the lowest is 0.21 when we had tested it, the average for this test is 0.207 which the first testing would not create enough energy

For the second testing our highest is a 0.214 and the lowest is a 0.20 but the average for this test is a 0.211

 

Future research

 

Our ideas for future research is to test out a spoon blade design or test the turbines on a higher speed

 

Conclusion

 

Our hypothesis is that the straight blade would generate more electricity was supported. We have done this project to test if wind turbines would be better for St. Mary’s to cut on electricity bills because in the rural villages gas, oil, and diesel are expensive many people do not work and are on non- employment paychecks, which is not very much money. The wind turbines would cut the electricity bills for most peoples homes.

 

Acknowledgements

 Thanks Nick for building our turbine base for our projects.Thanks Mr. Wood-gate for helping us understand what we are going to be finishing for a science fair project and giving us ideas on how to make our project. Thanks to Mr. Herbert for ordering our materials and giving us ideas on how to make our project and papers better and letting us do Green Ribbon Schools.

 

Work Cited:

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine#History