Collegiate Wind Turbine Competition in Las Vegas

Posted by Bruce

Hey guys!
I haven't posted a blog post in a while, but I hope you enjoy this read.

Over the year, UAF's engineering students have been involved in a collegiate wind turbine competition that had been started for the first time this year by the Department of Energy (DOE). The team consisted of 8 Mechanical, 2 Electrical, and 1 Business student. This whole project started first by the Mechanical Engineering Professor Rorik Peterson. He had heard about this project and applied to participate. DOE had only 10 Universities participate in this event in which we were fortunate to be one of them. One of the reasons we were chosen is because of our climate and characteristics of our State.

The picture above is a photo of our wind turbine team, "The Blades of Glory". We had first thought of "Breaking Wind" as our team name, but had to change due to some issue.

The picture above is a photo of our electrical components mounted to our generator.

The above picture is our fully built wind turbine getting ready to be test run in Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Conference Room. This room literally reminds me of a huge airplane manufacturing building.

 Here is another picture of our turbine in which this has another electrical component that got attached. If you look closer you can see that electrical tape is all over our turbine, and we had good reasons for this. Trust me... I'm an Engineer.

Here is another photo showing the front of the turbine and the blades with a cone. The blades were 3D printed with AVS 3D printing material. At first we were not building the blades to withstand high wind speeds and it would explode! The operating turbine would spin dangerously in which one can imagine its power being compared to a high powered rifle.

Right now as I am making this blog post, we are attending the turbine competition in Vegas. We are very fortunate to have all of the team members participate and help each other to finish this project. I encourage students to participate in cool projects like these if you ever get to hear about them because you learn a lot through experience.