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RILEY KAY
September 2020 - April 2021
ENGINEER 1P13
Learning Portfolio, McMaster University
Project One - Milestones
Each project milestone for Project One can be found below:
Milestone 0
Milestone 1
Team Milestones
Milestone 2
Milestone 3A
Milestone 3B
Milestone 4
Individual Milestones
Milestone 1
Milestone 3A
Milestone 4
So, in summary... what was our team's goal?
In this project, our team was given the challenge of engineering a wind turbine blade for turbines that were to be placed upon the rooftops of people's houses. In order to do this, we had to design a blade that was both cost efficient, and, more importantly, small enough so that it could both fit on the roof and not hit any nearby obstacles or other blades if neighbours happened to have these turbines as well.
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Our problem statement for the blade was as follows:
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"The turbine blade should be lightweight, weather resistant, durable and sturdy. The blades should be short enough to fit on a residential rooftop and not collide with neighbouring houses and turbines.The blades must also efficiently capture oncoming wind by reducing the drag to lift ratio."
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The design of our blade first had to be planned out with a preliminary objective tree:
... and after discussing with the rest of the team, a finalized objective tree:
That is when our team decided that both cost efficiency and keeping the blade of small size were of most importance, as well as making sure it had high energy efficiency.
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Before we could make the blade however, we needed to know what material to make it out of. Luckily, with the power of MPI's and GRANTA EduPack, we were able to make a solid decision.
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We compared graphs modelling yield strength vs. density times price (σy/ρCm):
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Young's Modulus vs. density times price (E/ρCm):
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Yield strength on its own (σy):
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... and Young's Modulus on its own (E):
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Each graph suggested that the following materials would be ideal to consider when engineering the blade:
From our wide selection of materials, we chose low alloy steel, tungsten alloys and bamboo as our top three candidates.
As shown, the process of both a criteria ranking and a decision matrix ultimately led us to the final decision to make the blade out of low alloy steel.
After our material was selected, we then got into the real stuff, which was actually designing the blade. We modelled the blade in Autodesk Inventor where we would soon conduct simulations on it that tested its deflection displacement at 3000 pascals.
When modelling the blade, we needed to make sure that the blade didn't deflect more than 10mm. With a bit of calculations, we found out that in order to achieve this, the thickness of the blade's shell needed to be at least 15mm, and at most 30mm.
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While experimenting with Autodesk Inventor, it was discovered that when the blade had an inner thickness of 25mm, it achieved this goal quite nicely, as the blade deflected approximately 9.661mm as shown in the screenshot on the side. This deflection displacement wasn't too low, but more importantly, it wasn't too high to potentially damage the blade.
The maximum dimensions for the blade ended up being 8.5m long, 1.4m wide and approximately 0.36m thick.
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