Wind Turbine

 As the year comes to a close we begin to reach our last few blog posts. This blog post in particular is on my classes’ most recent lab of creating a wind turbine. The primary physics concepts needed to understand the function of a wind turbine are:

The turbine is connected to a basic generator which could be either bought as a motor and then turned into a generator (a motor and generator function inverse of one another) or made. In our case we were only allowed to make the generator from coils of wire and a few magnets. The process of creating electricity with magnets is known as electro-magnetic induction. 

Electro-magnetic induction is to induce a current or voltage in a coil of wire by changing the magnetic field around the coil (changing the movement of charges) because magnetism is the movement of charges. The magnet and coil of wire method works because by moving the magnets around the coils of wire the magnetic field changes thus inducing a current in the wire through an alternating current. This change from mechanical energy to electric energy is what makes the wind turbine a generator. This is why the wind turbines were able to work.

The materials needed to make the turbine were:
water bottle
coil wires
disk magnets
square dowel
round dowel
LED
fender washer
screws
wood for the platform
glue

The water bottle was used to make the blades which spun to cause a voltage. In order for the bottle to form this design, we had to cut the bottle. First the top then the bottom then in half, then we placed cardboard pieces to help create the irregular shape.  When this was done, we plunged a hole through the cardboard with a sharpened piece of a round dowel. This round dowel went from the top of the machine to the bottom. The dowel allowed the bottle to spin freely without falling out the frame. We made 4 coils, each of which containing 200 turns. After these were glued down to a piece of cardboard, we used the fender washers and disk magnets to align with the coils that would later help induce the voltage. To do this, we made sure that the poles of the magnets were all facing the same way. When we attached the loose ends of the coils to a LED, we saw that we saw our success when our machine produced enough voltage to show up on the volt meter.  

Hints and Tips for Referencing

Use more than one coil but not too many! My group and I used 4 coils of wire (each about 200 turns) which provided enough voltage to register one of the highest recorded in all the classes. However, using too many coils would be a bad idea. The more coils means more resistance, and the extra resistance will most likely cancel out any extra voltage you might be producing.

If you choose to make the irregular shaped wind turbine my group and I choose you need to be ok with starting parts over. Don’t be intimidated by the water bottle being cut in half or properly placed on the blades. After cutting out one blade which was the perfect size use it to recreate it so your pieces are proportionate. Also don’t be intimidated by using your resources my classmates lades ranged from plastic spoons to perfectly carved cardboard blades.

If you were like my class the magnets were provided. When choosing your magnets choose the smaller ones which are pretty strong (broke a nail trying to get them apart) because otherwise it would be difficult to produce enough voltage that’ll be beneficial.

When making motors (previous post) we were taught to scrape the ends of the wire, because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to conduct a current. Then we used pliers to scrape the wires this time we used sand paper. MADE IT SO MUCH EASIER. So, yes use sand paper to scrape the ends, it will save you so much time and frustration. One a few coils I messed up on originally in length I scrapped them and other groups ended up using them. In this case of needing to increase the length scrape the ends and then scrape the end of another piece of wire by twisting them together, then apply electrical tape over.

This lab is again a learning tool. Therefore do not be upset if you cannot produce a certain amount of energy because you wouldn’t be able to do anything with it anyways. But if you’d like to get closer to creating more energy put more turns in your coils. My groups coils all together were 800 turns and produced the most volts in the class.