Windmill Project  

Horizontal Windmill

For the horizontal windmill we used the file that Mr. Dubick gave us. After we printing it we realized that the motor was to big for the print so we drilled a hole in the print, and then it was able to fit with the motor and spin well.

These are the readings we got. You can see the voltage fluctuates between around .75 volts and around .5 volts.

For the second part of the horizontal windmill, made a windmill that was longer using the given file as a base to see how that would affect the voltage.  

This is what the longer windmill looked like. I thought the longer blades would catch more wind but because it adds weight it actually does not boost the voltage produced and hurts the amount of volts produced, I used the same base from the file Mr. Dubick gave us so I needed a drill to make the hole for the motor a little bigger. You can see the oscilloscopes reading is around .7v to .4v

Vertical Windmill 

For the vertical windmill, the windmill spins on a vertical axis not a horizontal one. The first design Griffin made was an airfoil. We tried a few times with the airfoils but never got it working so we switched to a design inspired by a anemometers. This design should catch air very well and it did. 

Here is the printed design.

IMG_5740.MOV

Here is the design spinning.

Voltage Filter

Using capacitors and resistors we tried filtering our voltage to make it more consistent. We started with 100ohm and 1Mohm resistors then moved to capacitors where we used 1 uf, 450 pf, 10000 pf, and 100 uf. This worked well in making our voltage more steady and a smaller wave. You can see the oscilloscopes  below and how we connected the oscilloscopes  to the motor.