Table of Contents
Overview
MAE 4272 is a lab-based class intended to enage students to actively design, build, and analyze fluid-thermal systems, linking the fluid-mechanical and thermodynamic/heat-transfer components of the Cornell Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering core curriculum.
For this class' final project, students (in teams of 3-4) were tasked with designing the blades of a small-scale wind turbine according to a small set of mechanical and environmental constraints. We did this to demonstrate the application of the fluid-thermal analytical techniques learned in class to an open-ended design project.
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Design statement
In teams of 3 to 4 students (assigned), you are tasked with designing the blades of a small-scale wind turbine with the following requirements:
- The blades must have a maximum length of 6 inches, measured from root to tip.
- The blades must be compatible with a standard hub piece, 1 inch in radius, whose geometry is provided.
- The wind turbine must be designed to operate at a fixed angular velocity ( \Omega ), whose value is to be determined by your team, but should never exceed 2000 rpm.
- The wind turbine must be used in an environment where the wind follows a velocity distribution well described by a Weibull probability distribution with parameters ( k = 5 ) and ( c = 5 ):
$$ p(U) = \left(\frac{k}{c}\right)\left(\frac{U}{c}\right)^{k-1} \exp\left[-\left(\frac{U}{c}\right)^k\right] $$
where ( U ) is the incoming wind velocity in m/s.