On my team, I was responsible for leading the designing and manufacturing of the wind turbine. The design consists of three helical, hollow, 3D printed fins that attach to laser cut wooden arms. These wooden arms then are then screwed and clamped into a 3D printed mount. This 3D printed mount, made up of 4 individual parts each, clamp down on the metal rod, joining them together. Therefore, when the blades spin, so does the metal rod in the center.

My teammates on the other hand assisted with several other areas of the process such as providing me with feedback on whether the fins would sufficiently catch air by using the CFD capabilities of SolidWorks, as well as programming with Mat Lab to do some of the necessary calculations to measure performance.

We knew going into it that picking a helical design such as this one would be much more difficult to design correctly and even though we tried several iterations, we were unable to get it to function properly in the time frame given. However, this project was still a great learning experience and activity for practicing team work.