Purpose of the experiment: To see if the temperature over time inside the tower has an effect on the movement of the pinwheel.

Hypothesis: Will the temperature over time inside the tower  affect the pinwheel moving faster?

Background: Solar Updraft Tower is a renewable-energy power plant for generating electricity from solar power. The model solar updraft tower was constructed in Turkey as a civil engineering project. It is a project that use sunshine to heat up the temperature and create a solar energy. Sunshine heats the air beneath a very wide greenhouse-like rooted collector structure surrounding the central base of a very tall chimney.

Power output depends on two primary factors: collector area and chimney height. The collector area is a place to collects and warms a greater volume of air to flow up the chimney, and the chimney height will the increase the pressure difference via the stack effect (a movement of air into and out of buildings, chimneys, or other containers).

 

 

 

Solar Updraft Tower works by the hot air temperature. The air is heated by the sun under a large translucent roof (greenhouse effect). Due to the chimney effect, the heated air is then sucked in by a central vertical cylindrical tube. The updraft wind, thus created, drives turbines with generators and so generates electricity (as the picture below)

 

 

In this project, we apply the same process like this in a similar way. Because we won’t able to produce a large energy so we do not use turbines and collector are. However, we tried to create a simple solar updraft tower in an creative way. After getting enough information and materials, we came up with this idea for our mini solar updraft tower.

 

Material: a scissor, a short wire, 3 cans, tape, mini multicenter, hot plate, 2 corner brace zincs, a pinwheel.

 

Set Up:

• Put 3 cans on the top of each other, and use the tape to wrap around them.
• Wrap 2 corner brace zincs on the bottom of the cans tower. Make sure that the bottom of the cans cannot touch on the hot plate
• Use paper and make it into a corn, then insert into the bottom of tower
• Bend a wire, and stick the pinwheel on the top by tape
• Wrap the that wire both side of the top can (as the picture below)

• Make a small hole in the middle of cans tower to insert the mini multimeter
• Place the whole tower on the hot place
• Open mini multicenter and set it at Fahrenheit degree
• Open hot plate and mark up on the pinwheel to count how many rotation it move at the different temperature.

 

How does it work?

The air enters the base of tower and is heated by the hot plate. The hot plate will will heat up the air and increase the air speed. Air movement drives at the base of the tower to generate renewable electricity. Finally, the hot air naturally rises up to the tower and it called “updraft effect”. In the video below, we tried to test at different temperature in 1 minutes for each, and the pinwheel moved around 3.5 rotations at 170°F.

 

 

Result:

 

As the result, we can say that at the high temperature, the air’s speed will increase and pinwheel will move faster.

 

Conclusion:

Overall, we were successful in proving our hypothesis is true. Even though we had a hard time in collecting data, and the experiment did not run very well, we still figure out that the air’s speed will increase, and the pinwheel will move faster at high temperature.

On another hand, we had some issues during experiment. First, we couldn’t prepare the materials the first week so we were a little bit behind. Second, we changed our ideals too much when  the experiment fail one or three time. Instead of dealing and figuring out the problem, we changed ideals and materials and it took us amount of time. It is going to be a lesson for us if we have any chance to work in any project like this in the future. Finally, the pinwheel moves very slow at a highest temperature on the hot plate because we do not have any fans or pinwheel at collector area to collect the air and create wind. That is why the number of rotation we got really small even though the temperature was really high. If we have a chance to work together again, we will try to finish everything as soon as possible because we do not know that whether the experiment works  well or not.

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Reference

 

“Ana Sayfa.” Solar Updraft Tower-Türkiye. Web. 02 May 2016.