Wind Turbine

We Made Electricity!
So, Recently in class we were making wind turbines. It was a fun activity and what we did from it is generate electricity. Here are all the materials we used to make our turbine:
-Boards of wood
-2L Soda Bottles
-5 Bolts 
-5 Magnets
-Styrafoam
-Wood Stick
-Glue
-Copper wire

The wood was for the base of our wind turbine. Our group made it look almost realistic to a windmill. The soda bottles were cut into fourths and used as the wings for the turbine where the wind it. The bolts were glued into the styrofoam, as our wings were put in to rotate on, with our magnets attract/stuck onto the bolts. This helped for the stick to be glued onto this styrofoam with everything on/attached to it so when the magnets rotated over the base, the copper wires were hit by this magnetic field.

Physics Concepts

Let's go back to day 1-3; Newton's Laws. All 3 of Newton's laws were reintroduced and shown in this experiment. The first one; an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted about an outside force, was used in the case where the wind from the fan blew on the rested wings and made them rotate. Newton's second law states that more force will cause more acceleration, so the faster the wings were rotated, the less mass didn't matter. The third law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction was used in the case that the fan pushed wings, wings pushed fan.

There's one physics concept recently exampled that is the most important one in this case is electromagnetic induction. The coils of wire, when a magnet is moved around them, causes a change in magnetic field which induces a voltage and causes a current. This is what actually generated our electricity.

Our WindTurbine:

Here is our magnet placement in our wind turbine. We had 5 magnets attracted to 5 bolts glued into the styrofoam. These magnets, when rotated by the wind, rotated over our 5 coils of wires as you can see were taped and glued down to the base of wood. When rotated over the wire, the magnets caused a changed in magnetic field and induces a voltage and causes a current, which generated our electricity. We didn't have a picture of the coils close up, but here is the two in one for the magnets and coils, the process of electromagnetic induction.

 Here are our wings for the turbine. Our wings were made out of a quarter of a 2 litre bottle. these wings helped us rotate the magnets over the wires. The reason we chose big wings/bottle was because our middle/styrofoam magnets circle was a big plan so we needed much wind to be forced onto the system so it will have an easier time rotating and forced.

Here is our full model. We used tall wood to keep the wings from hitting the ground or table. We also wanted to make our wind turbine look realistic, and I think we would've won for a creativity section.

This is our video of our turbine working! We generated both .007V&A. This is too low to light a light bulb though, because we didn't generate enough voltage. Don't worry, we'll work on that!

Some things that caused us to get a low voltage was:
1. Our magnets when rotating kept hitting the coils of wires which caused the wind turbine to not spin as fast or consistent. This was friction.
2. Our coils got messed up while spinning them, so that could've been a factor of not generating not enough voltage.
3. The magnets could've been poled differently, which generates different magnetic field which would cause the current to be back and forth and not generated correctly.

If I could do this project again, I would make my base the same. In the generator area, I would make a bigger coil of wire and have the magnets spin inside of it instead of over it. Going through the coil has a better electromagnetic induction because it changed the magnetic field more instead of over it. I would also make sure everything is perfectly measured and equal torques of the wing side and opposing side of the rotating part. This all will cause a smooth, better running and electricity generating wind mil.