Purple Icing's Wind Turbine

During the past couple of weeks in Tech Ed Class, our group Purple Icing has been working on a wind turbine to enter into a online competition called Kid Wind.  In this competition, you can earn prize money for your school by creating a wind turbine.  My partner and I built our first prototype of the wind turbine we wanted to build out of paper towel tubes, toilet paper tubes, half of a green easter egg, a bottle cap and a wooden skewer.  We designed our blades so they were not only a unique shape, but most importantly were curved.  We thought that the curved blades would catch the wind better than just a plain simple blade shape.  The next blade that we tested was like the shape and curvature of our first model, just on a bigger scale.  I found that these curved blades when compared to a simpler design with no curvature that my partner made, the simpler flat design worked alot better than my curved blades.  This is because the wind gets trapped in the curve of my blade and that prevented it from producing as much power as it could.  So from then on we decided to go with a simpler, no curve design that my partner came up with.

For the design competition Kid Wind, we entered the design that my partner made with three flat, no curve blades.  This design produced allot more voltage and and was more efficient than my other blade prototypes.  Our turbine for Purple Icing produced 0.74 volts with 100ohms of resistance at a wind speed of 4m/s at 25cm away from a box fan.  The sweep area of our wind turbine is 0.1963 meters squared.

We decided to name our team for the Kid Wind competition Purple Icing because not only is purple a lovely color, but purple has been my all time favorite color since preschool.  The Icing part of our name is just because everyone loves icing and so do I. You can check out Purple Icing on the Kid Wind web sight to learn more about our turbine and the competition.      

Electricity Quiz

This is a picture of my electricity quiz that I created in Tech Ed class.  It includes electricity questions about things from magnets to transformers.  I created this quiz by mounting metal brads, which conduct electricity, to a piece of cardboard.  Then I wired the question to the answer on the back of the cardboard by connecting the correct brads with wire.  This created a circuit when we used a tester box.  The tester box consisted of two AA batteries to power a LED attached to the battery with wire. There are also two wires comming out of the tester box to make the connections with.  When a circuit is created by connecting the questions to the correct answers on my electricity quiz using my tester box, the LED in the tester box lights up.  That is how you know that you got the question correct. This project was a very smart way to not only learn your facts about electricity, but also learn how to create a circuit.

Series and Parallel Circuits

In Tech ED class this trimester, we have been learning about how series and parallel circuits work and creating them ourselves. You can create a series circuit by placing two or more bulbs that run one path to both batteries. This means that each of the bulbs is getting 1.5 volts each even though there are two batteries that both emit 1.5 volts. You might ask the question then, "Why is each bulb only getting 1.5 volts when there are 3 volts coming from the batteries?" To answer that question, we should look at a parallel circuit. A parallel circuit has the same amount of batteries and bulbs as a series circuit, but each bulb is getting 3 volts. This is because a parallel circuit has bulbs that run their own circuit to both of the batteries. This means that each bulb is getting the full 3 volts from the batteries. This is why in the series circuit, the bulbs are only getting 1.5 volts because the bulbs run one path back to the batteries. You may not think that knowing about how series circuits and parallel circuits work is an important thing to know, but it is. Say you wanted to build your own house one day. You will need to know the difference between series and parallel circuits because if you try to use a parallel circuit on every light, you will end up using a whole lot of wire. But, if you string all of your lights onto a series circuit, you will end up with all the lights in your house not working when one goes out. Still don't think it matters?  Well I know one thing for sure,  I won't be the one searching for the one burnt out bulb in my series circuit house at 2 am.