User:Medelen8/ENES100/Wind Turbine Implement

Goals for implementation performance, cost and quality
Problem Statement: To design and create different shrouds that improves the power level and wattage output on a wind turbine using CAD and a 3D printer.
 * Find out the cost of the Wind Turbine
 * Stabilize the Wind Turbine to make it more sturdy
 * Find out the physics behind the wind turbine to be able to come up with a more effective wind turbine
 * Test the power level and wattage output with different designed shrouds
 * Research which shrouds are more efficient
 * Use CAD to design the shrouds
 * Use 3D printer and/or other materials to make the shrouds
 * Finish project

Considerations for human user/operators
This project is relatively safe, just make sure to be smart with the leaf blower and careful while wiring the wind turbine.

The manufacturing and/or purchasing of parts
In order to complete a build of an effective working turbine we had to install a couple things to make it more efficient. Whether it was a shroud design, stabilizing, or something like magnetic tape we had to manufacture and buy many of things in order to succeed. When we first got the project we did a couple of test on it to see how it worked. Before doing anything we just took it out of the box and instantly realized we needed to stabilize it. The turbine with a very light blow on it would shake and wobble. After that we decided we needed to come up with a wind lens and or shroud in order to maximize the amount of kilowatts it produced. As a crew we decided to design a shroud and we came up with a couple different designs and came across the question of how to attach them to the actual turbine. Luckily, the group before us made the turbine magnetic, this led us to just using magnetic tape to attach it. All in all, we manufactured a more sturdy base, we manufactured a wind shroud, and we bought a roll of magnetic tape that cost about 5 dollars.

The assembly of parts into larger constructs
The construction of a more solid base was pretty straight forward. The original design was made out of plexi-glass and bent, wobbled, and cracked all too easily. In order to prevent this, as a group we decided to use wood to stabilize it. We thought that wood was the smart and easy way to do it. We knew though we needed to stabilize it though because just taking it in and out of the box was dangerous. For example, you can clearly see that just moving it around the plexi glass ended up snapping and breaking all the way through.

After tinkering with a few ideas we ultimately came up with glueing down the turbine to a bigger piece of wood underneath. Then from there extend two support beams from the base to right below the fan/propellor at 45 degrees. Although it was very stable, there was still a crack in the main frame. In order to prevent it from cracking more we decided to put a piece of wood right on front to support the frame. This completely stabilized and got rid of all the wobbling and bending and cracking issues on the main frame. However we came to realize that the fan/propellor wobbled really bad on its own. Even though the frame was well supported the fan/propellor was not. In order to fix this we came up with the design to support it by simply cutting and putting a piece of wood directly under the propellor.

The break down of high level components into module designs (including algorithms and data structures)
This is the high level design of how the Wind Turbine is suppose to look like. What it does is uses the blades of the Wind Turbine to generate power and then on the display it will say how much Watts, Amps, Volts, and Sensor Value we have made.

Algorithms (data structures, control flow, data flow)
The formula, Current = Volts / Resistance, is somethign we learned in the beginning of the semester in ENES 100 and is also commonly used throughout all of electronics. Fluid Dynamics helped our group understand how the wind blade moves and how it generates power, which made it a lot easier for my group to find ways to increase the amount of power we could get out of the turbine. These are all the formulas used in this project: :$$I = \frac{V}{R} \quad \text{or}\quad V = IR \quad \text{or} \quad R = \frac{V}{I}. P = \frac{V^2}{R} $$

The next formula for how the Wind Turbine generates energy is P=½ρAV³. P stands for Power, Watts. ρ stands for the air density. A stands for the Area of the of the wind turbine blades. V is the Wind speed.

Reference: http://www.windgenkits.com/faq.htm

The programming language
The Wind Turbine is programmed using Arduino. The coding language is basically the same language as Java and C++. It is fairly simple to understand after doing the tutorial of Arduino.

The low-level design (coding)
Here is the code to make the wind turbine display on the computer screen.

For the next group they should use this code to make the LCD screen display the inputs

The integration of software in electronic hardware (size of processor, communications, etc)
The wind turbine used many different software devices to function properly. The wind turbine itself could be categorized as software. The wind lens is wired so that it can be programmed to show accurate readings of different outputs. To show them we used two hardware devices. The basic circuit board that we used to display the data was an Arduino Uno board. This board is small so that it can it practically anywhere. Then we wired the circuits to a display board so that the turbine could be more portable. To show our power levels we wired the Uno to a display board. The display board can be programmed to show many different readings from power levels to to mathematical equations. The previous group programmed it to display how many volts and watts are being released when there is wind traveling through the turbine. After some extensive problem solving, we found out that the display was broken. There was a pin that was completely missing and the pin was suppose to connect to ground. Therefore, the power wasn't being distributed equally through the circuit board. We then reprogrammed the code so that the turbine would display the power levels on a computer monitor.

The integration of software with sensor, actuators and mechanical hardware
We also used a 3D printer to create our shrouds. We realized that the best way to create the most exact shroud would be with a 3D printer. After creating the part in CAD Audodesk Inventor, we used our local high school's printer since Howard's printer was broken. This is where some different problems start to occur. The printer wasn't big enough to print a scale model of our parts. Therefore, we tried to print them as big as we could however, it wasn't good enough. The shroud was way to small to extract and real data.

Test and analysis procedures
To test the wind turbine we want to see what the readings are from 5, 10, and 15 feet away using a leaf blower to spin the blades. Also, we would like to compare original readings to the new readings with the shrouds on the turbine.

The verification of performance to system requirements
Not applicable

The validation of performance to customer needs
Not applicable

Sourcing, partnering, and supply chains
Not applicable

Possible implementation process improvements
An improvement for the implementation process is if the group before us made sure that the design process was fully finished, because almost everything that they did was wrong and had to be fixed, examples are we had to change the design, code, and wiring of the Wind Turbine.

Next Steps
The next steps that have to be done are creating shrouds that are the right size for the Wind turbine. Also, getting a LCD display so we do not need the computer to display the data. Then, all that has to be done is to test and see which shroud works best.