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E26: 3D printed windmill
Intro-to-design wind turbine: CAD, printed blades and tower, wind-tunnel validation, and measured power and stiffness targets.
Background
In my introduction to engineering design course I helped build a 3D printed wind turbine aimed at balancing efficiency and structural integrity. The rotor produced about 1.6 W peak, and the tower survived loads up to 127.5 N. Blade shaping leaned on first principles aerodynamics, Bernoulli’s principle and Newton’s laws, with emphasis on a predictable linear deflection response (about 4.44 N/mm) to keep the tower stiff and trustworthy.
Validation
We verified performance with wind-tunnel runs and deflection measurements, then fed those results back into CAD iterations. My contributions spanned solid modeling, fabrication, and test planning, the loop that let us converge on components that met both aerodynamic and mechanical goals.