Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

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 As part of a lab project, our team designed and built a small-scale wind turbine to fit inside a wind tunnel for data collection. The objective was to use experimental results to scale the design to a larger turbine and predict its power output. We selected a three-bladed Darrieus configuration with a NACA 0015 airfoil cross-section for each blade.

I modeled both turbine sizes in SolidWorks using plot data of a NACA 0015 airfoil and laser-cut the connectors and airfoil cross-sections for fabrication. During testing, our team assembled the turbines using dowels and plastic wrap to accurately replicate the geometry of the small-scale model. After gathering power output data from our large scale wind turbine, we compared our power coefficient with our previous model.