Week 1

Windmills

(CE & EnvE)

Civil, Environmental Engineering and Building Science

Civil Engineering

Civil engineering is the process in which engineers design and construct infrastructure like roads and buildings to create safe spaces for communities to live.

Environmental Engineering

Environmental engineering focuses on protecting and conserving our natural resources by developing solutions to manage pollution and waste to help sustain our world.

Building Science

Building science is all about studying how buildings react with energy, materials, and the environment to better the comfort and safety of our society.

Skill Building Activities

Battery Tester

In this project, we built a simple device to test battery power using wire, magnets, and a paper cup. When we touched the wire ends to a battery, we observed how the magnets reacted, which helped us see if the battery still had a charge.

By building this tester ourselves, we learned how electric current can create a magnetic field and how basic circuits work. It also helped us develop skills in careful construction, and observation.

Paper Cup Motor

By completing this project, we learned how electricity and magnetism work together to create motion. Building the motor helped us understand how electric currents and magnetic fields interact in a real, hands-on way.

We also improved our problem-solving skills because we encountered some problems which caused the coil to stay in place but we were able to overcome them. This activity made science feel more real and helped us learn by actually doing it, not just reading about it.

Windmill Kit

Through this project, we learned how different design factors like the blade number, angle, shape, and size affect the efficiency of windmills in lifting weight using wind energy. We experimented with real variables and used data to find the best combinations for performance.

Building and testing our windmill helped us understand key physics concepts like torque, mechanical advantage, and energy conversion. We also developed teamwork, problem-solving, and engineering design skills by constantly testing, adjusting, and improving our designs. It was a hands-on way to learn how science, math, and creativity come together in real-world challenges.

Creating our Windmill - First Steps

Planning out our design

To start our design, we decided to first list the goals we were trying to achieve with our windmill to better grasp what our final project would look like.

The goals were:

Using 4 (or more) blades, making it stable enough so it doesn't get blown away, generate electricity, and power a light bulb (lighting the bulb was extra credit).

Creating the Blades

Based on our skill building experiments/activities, we already had in mind what the shape and angle of the blades would be. The only problem was there size as one plank wasn't enough, but to counter this, we simply taped two planks together.

Creating the Base

We went in with the idea of using a tripod like stand for the base, and using sticks in between the columns to better support the foundation of our windmill. Furthermore, we added a small platform on top of the base where we would put our generator.

3D Models/Printing Used

3D Model of Windmill

3D Print Model of Generator

Final Design/Project

After constructing the base and blades, we re-drew the blueprints for the design of our windmill to something more detailed to help us visualize our plan better.

We had multiple challenges that occurred throughout the project, but we were able to use critical thinking and come up with solutions as a group together.

One of the many challenges that we faced with our windmill which could have affected our goals was its stability. At one point our base's tripod design couldn't handle the weight of our propeller, which caused the windmill to tilt forward when left alone. We quickly solved this by adding more support at the bottom so that the weight would be distributed more evenly over a wider surface area.

Another problem was the speed of the windmill's spin. There were actually two problems with this, first was that our windmill's axle was too tight for the generator's hole and the second problem which came a while after was that the blades needed an initial push to get it moving. To work out the first problem, we decided to do multiple things to make the axle fit and spin faster, such as: Sanding the axle so that it was thinner and smoother, making the hole a bit bigger and sanding it as well. For the second problem, we noticed that once we fit our axle into platform and generator, it was tilting downwards. After testing out with a fan as to why the windmill was only spinning once we gave it an initial push we found that once we angled the axle so that it was parallel to the ground, it was able to spin by itself. So that we wouldn't be constantly holding up the axle, we decided to attach a bearing below the axle to help keep it parallel.

windmilltestingG04.mp4

Overall our group was able to complete most of the goals we set out to do in the beginning, the only goal we weren't able to complete was the extra credit task, which was to generate enough electricity through the windmill to power up a light bulb. The found that our only error in our design was that it couldn't generate enough electricity to be transformed into light energy because our blades were quite heavy which meant they couldn't spin fast enough. If we were ever to come back to this project we would keep that in mind and make it our main goal to find a way to actually light an LED. Despite this, we were still able to incorporate 4 blades which move by the wind, make our windmill stable enough to withstand strong winds, and generate electricity through our generator which created an electro magnetic field. After this week, we were able to attain new skills in engineering such as creating electromagnetic fields and constructing 3D models and our windmill, as well as improving our ability to generate solutions through critical thinking.

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