This project was for MEAM 347, the Mechanical Engineering Junior Design Lab and I worked on it with Jared Rogers and Toni Ann-Peck. The goal of the project was to design and build a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) to be pushed on a cart to generate the most power on a short run down the main hall of the engineering building. The only restriction was that the turbine had to fit through a standard door. There are two main types of VAWTs, drag based devices (Savonius style) and lift based devices (Darrieus style). While Savonius turbines are less efficient because they solely rely on drag and the speed of the wind, Darrieus turbines are more difficult to construct and require an initial rotation in order to pickup rotational speed.

Going for the promise of more efficiency, our team decided to construct a Darrieus style turbine. On the right is a video of us testing the full scale turbine for the final demo.