Renewable Energy for a Large Population

For this project, we were tasked with designing a windmill that would be used in a windmill farm on Wolfe Island that would be providing energy for Kingston Ontario. We had to take advantage of the wind by minimizing inertia to maximize efficiency. We were also told to make our wind turbines durable and long-lasting. During this project, we looked at all the objectives constraints, and functions of the wind turbine and turbine blade to come up with a suitable design for our project. We used our findings to make MPI charts on Granta and narrowed down our materials to CFRP, high-carbon steel, and Tungsten. After comparing them to each other in a table, we decided on CFRP because it performed the best based on our criteria, which were durability, water resistance, and fatigue strength. After that, we estimated the thickness of our turbine, by calculating the deflection of the blade with different thicknesses and then determined a thickness that fit into the range of 8.5mm-10mm, by using Autodesk Inventor to perform a stress analysis. After doing the stress analysis, we came up with a thickness of 70mm.