Year 10 istem Motion Project

RECYCLED WINDMILL - SUCCESS?

Our group in year 10, DC Motors, consisting of Ben, Armaan, Gururaj and Loudonald, were required for our ISTEM project to promote renewable energy and resources by constructing blades for a wind turbine out of only recycled materials that were personally brought in. These blades would be required to produce energy when strapped onto a mini-windmill. This project lasted from week one to week 10 during term one. ISTEM is a subject that investigates science, technology, engineering and mathematics and the potential uses of all of these things together.

To start off our windmill design project we created 3 different blade designs which we thought were going to succeed in production power. These three designs were different from each other, some had 4 blades and some had 3, even the way they were curved was different, each design had different sizes, length and width. Once we finalised our blade design we began the process of bringing them to life. We used our unique skills to create each blade. We started off by ruling our designs on cardboard and then precisely cutting them out with a box cutter. 

Once our blade designs were ready for the process of testing, we carefully examined each blade and saw how well each blade was going and which parts we could improve, while we were testing the design we also recorded the data which would be helpful in identifying its overall success. In the future we would have to see if by doing an improvement or fixing a flaw, whether it would actually improve the design or not. In some instances we carefully watched the blade spin around and we noticed that the blades were falling apart from the dowel, so we decided to add glue between the blade and dowel so it could be held firmly. This is an improvement that was made to our design that was noticed due to our constant testing and experimentation.

What was the result of our hard work? Once we had finished in all of our testing and had chosen our final design we had to compete with the remainder of our classmates to see who had the most functional and practical design. There were six different groups in our class, to achieve victory you would have to produce the most power. This was calculated by how much voltage and current was created during the spin of the windmill. Overall our group achieved third place, being beaten by only two other groups. This can be counted as a success as not only did our ideas and designs reach our goal, but we also learnt what was holding us back and why some people did better than us. This allows us to make improvements and further our knowledge about aerodynamics.

Ben Armaan, Gururaj and Loudonald
Year 10