Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Design
This project for the Junior Design Lab was to design and build a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) to be pushed on a cart to generate the most power on a short run down the main hall of the engineering building. The only restriction was that the turbine had to fit thorough a standard door. There are two main types of VAWT, drag based devices (Savonius style) and lift base devices (Darrieus style). Because they solely rely on the drag Savonius turbines are less efficient than their Darrieus Counter parts because they are fundamentally limited to the the speed of the wind. The Darrieus can run faster than the wind, and actually will create its own apparent wind velocity, thus creating more power.
Going for the promise of more efficiency, our team decided to construct a Darrieus style turbine. In the three year that this project has been done, only one other team has gotten a lift based system to work, and even that was a hybrid style Lenz turbine. We took on the full challenge of the Darrieus as a fun project and challenge to ourselves. Here is a video of us testing the full scale turbine on a standard push cart for the final Demo: |
Small Scale Wind Tunnel Testing
Small scale testing was done in the school's wind tunnel to determine the optimal design for the full scale turbine. We tried 4 different Darrieus turbines and 2 different Savonius. the data was plotted in non-dimensional space and was used to help estimate the power produced by the full scale turbine. From this power estimate an optimal gear ratio was chosen to maximize the power generated in a DC motor used as a generator.
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