^The steps to convert wind into useable energy

^General Electric’s clever graph on the noise level for a average wind turbine.

Here is the outline:

Outline/ Handout.

Contemporary Sci & Innovation Lab Experiment:                                     Wind Energy

 

Purpose:                          Generate energy basing off wind power and observe distance importancy on quantity and quality of the energy produced.

 

Background:                               Recently, many U.S. corporations have deployed renewable energy systems at their headquarters, industrial facilities and retail stores. Wind Power is one of these systems, which not only give companies an opportunity to avoid future oil price growth along with  increase in energy reliability, but also help companies to be environmentally responsible.

 

Conducting the experiment would help to analyze how the wind turbine works and whether it’s really working.

Procedure:    

 Setup:      Build the NXT Wind Turbine using «LEGO» model (instructions are inside), get a fan with an effect of at least 40W and ruler or measuring tape.

Data collection:            Based on the angle, the Wind Turbine is turned toward fan, the level of the energy varies. (straight facing the fan, 45 degrees away, 90 degrees away and etc.)

Analysis:

1. How the change in the angle, in which the turbine is turned toward the fan, associates with the change in the leverage of the energy produced.
2. Does the experiment show the capability of the Wind Turbine to produce energy and for further references, would it be used on the larger scale?

The Lab should take 30 minutes to complete.

 

Results

The lab unfortunately had a technical error which caused the sabotage of our lab.  The reader for the nxt brick was uncooperative, and therefore the action of the lab was not properly performed

That being said, the spirit of the lab was still identified by the group performing it; by using watts per second on the brick, the group realized that optimal conditions for the wind turbine are in locations where the wind is as close to the center as possible, without deviating away too far north or south of the immediate gust.  What that may mean is that locations such as mountain tops are deep gullies are not ideal, because the center force of wind is below and above the turbine, respectively.

 

Final Thoughts

I would like to thank my group, Andrey, Marina, An, and Jose for all the hard work and effort they put into this project.  It was an absolute pleasure working with them, and hope they are successful in their upcoming endeavors at Suffolk.

The project itself revealed quite a bit on how Wind produces a smart renewable energy source from an unlimited source of energy.  The hope is one day to maximize the potential of that energy….perhaps by smarter processing of th4e energy produced (less Joules used to power a light-bulb in lamest terms), or a more efficient wind turbine to produce MORE joules.

 

Below is the work the team did on the powerpoint and handout, respectively.

http://web.cas.suffolk.edu/faculty/lshatz/Sustainability_class/wind_eric.pdf

http://web.cas.suffolk.edu/faculty/lshatz/Sustainability_class/windenergyeric.pdf

This blog does not need much information to make its point; we all unanimously decided on using the Lego alternative energy kit to recreate a wind-energy model.  Due to the difficulty of idea #2, being that we could not re-create a green roof for an experiment, the lego windmill made the most sense for all involved.  All the parts and instructions came from a mixture of class resources and the internet for instructions and sample lab work, we settled on using Wind.

Not much more to say; it was an easy decision that we backed up with plenty of information.

I’ll keep this one short and sweet (edit: especially since it never got posted!) I was very impressed with the hardware Tom had on these machines and the study of electricity!  The biggest thing for me was how Westinghouse actually backed the inventor of a type of coil we all see in use today…a man whose inventions and patents far surpassed Edison!

All in all it was a direct approach to learning, he showed us hands on the machines in use, gave great historical context, and answered all of our questions.  Well done!

I wish I could say the trip to the museum was as informative as i was led to believe…..but I would be lying if I did.  I prefer to remain honest throughout these blogs, and so stopping now would be downright hypocritical.  So here it is; the exhibits on renewable energy did very little to inspire me on a project for the remainder of class.

I wish I could create a laundry list of reasons why this trip was mediocre at best, but the sole reason remains prevalent in my mind; it was all information that could have been looked up on the internet.  I do not wish to discredit the work down by the museum by trivializing our efforts as students to simply google the information; I see it from the point of view that we are academically capable of finding relevant sources from credible locations (scientific American, JSTOR, EBSCOHOST, et. al).

The trip was a nice way of seeing the examples of energy in person at a very nice set-up, but the internet has provided better information thus far.

Our numbers for the lab, due to technical error, will be displayed below:

 

nolan%20excel

The corresponding graph is as follows:

 

 

The next error should be noted with the graph itself; once again, google spreadsheet does a poor job of graph editing to remove such pests as the square color key and would give little options to fix the close plots in the middle to show the slight differences.

Nevertheless, the numbers from the lab do accurately reflect the plots, as 2 points were nearly identical.  The numbers corresponded logically with the amount of shakes to the higher or lower voltage, respectively to higher or lower number of shakes within the 60 second range.