Our team designed and fabricated a wind turbine that demonstrates an eco-friendly method of generating electricity along with relevant engineering principles. 

Design: 

When designing, we segmented our entire wind tower in two different parts. We designed and manufactured the tower blade and the tower body separately. As for the blade design, it is necessary to consider several factors such as blade profile, angle of attack, blade number and angle of twist to increase the efficiency of the wind tower. We researched each of the factors when designing our tower blade to get the optimum efficiency. For our blade profile, we chose to use NACA 4412 from the family of NACA airfoils which is commonly used at low wind speeds like our project. The angle of attack is an important parameter in most three-dimensional aerodynamic models of rotating wind turbines. We decided to use 6 degrees for our angle of attack which gave the highest Lift to Drag force ratio (L/D). Our wind turbine had 3 blades for efficiency and stability. Airfoil’s angle of twist plays an important role in producing the amount of drag force and making the wind turbine aerodynamically more efficient. After researching, we found that an angle of twist of 15 degree produced the highest power for NACA 4412 and the maximum energy production. Therefore, our team chose to use an angle of twist of 15 degrees for our airfoil in this project. 

For the tower body structure, we split our tower structure in two separate parts because of the constraints of the 3D printer and later we glued the two parts in one single piece. As for the tower body, it is very important to keep the structure symmetrical. We used an equilateral triangular base for our structure so in case there is a shift or change in the wind direction, our wind tower will be stable and rigid by withstanding the stress. We used truss structure for our body design as it is very commonly used in real-life wind towers because it gives the maximum stability and stiffness at the lowest cost. In terms of stability, the structure of interconnecting triangles means that the load-bearing capacity of the truss tower is huge. The structure effectively manages both compression and tension, by spreading out the load 

Design Tool: 

SolidWorks was the major tool used for the wind turbine design. 3D models of the blade and tower were created in SolidWorks. In order to efficiently create the truss structure with complex joints, the weldments feature was employed. The tower was modeled as a whole for use in static stress simulation, and then the split feature was used to separate into bodies. An assembly was created with the two parts of the tower and the blade, as well as a drawing of the tower 

We employed finite element analysis to predict the stiffness of our tower model through Solidworks static stress simulation. The simulations modeled the stiffness test to be conducted in the lab. The tower base was fixed and a bending load was evenly distributed onto the inner surface of the motor mount. The maximum Hencky-von Mises stress, equivalent strain, and displacement and the minimum factor of safety were recorded for varying loads. Stiffness was calculated at each load value.