Over the past few days, students have been building wind turbines in an attempt to turn moving air into electricity. Wind Power has long been thought of as a solution to the problem of Dirty Energy, but perfecting that solution is no easy task. Some designs are better than others!

Today we finally got around to testing our designs. Each pair of students brought their windmill blades to the front of the class, placed them atop the tower, and hooked up a multimeter (which was used to measure volatage). We then used an electric fan to test their design in low, medium, and high winds.

The winner for the cluster was Nicole Farrell. Her clean, sleek design generated 518 mV of electricity. The conversions are a little messy, as they deal with both voltage and current, but I think a life-size version of Nicole’s design would be powerful enough to power the entire school, at least. Great job, Nicole!

June 4 – Wind Turbine Results (pg711)