Wind Turbine Challenge

Building and testing wind turbines is an engaging, hands-on activity that helps students understand how turbines make electricity! Students love seeing which turbine will make the most electrical power!

For this activity, we purchased a kit from Flinn Scientific Canada that came with various turbine blade materials, corks, motors, and other needed materials. The link for the kit is: https://www.flinnsci.ca/generating-electricity-with-wind---flinn-stem-design-challenge/ap8051/ . It is important to have a multimeter (for reading electrical output) and a retort stand or some kind of stand to put the turbines on for testing. You will also need a floor or table fan.

You could do this same activity without purchasing the kit however, if you have a motor and some of the other necessary materials. Students design a blade for their turbine after researching various blade designs. They then decide how many blades their turbine will have (again, researching is key in making this decision). They must also decide on the material they will use to construct their blades. Again, research is crucial.

They then construct their turbine and bring it to me for testing with a fan and by placing it on a retort stand/motor holder (you will see what I did in the picture below). After test 1, I put all the results on the board so that students can see how much power their turbine made in relation to other turbines. We then discuss as a class the results and show each group's turbine and how it rated for power output.

Groups then redesign their turbine and come for a second test to see if the redesign was better than the initial design. They will find most times that their energy output improves after the redesign, which is the engineering process in action!