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.