Wind Turbine

Before diving into a project like this, one would need some knowledge of electromagnetic induction. If not you will surely fail because this is the primary concept we used to create the maser piece of our wind turbine. Electromagnetic induction requires a magnet, coiled current carrying wire and source that collects current. When a magnet passes through the wire coils there is a current induced to the wire. And for our wind turbine we used four tightly coiled wires for a current to be induced in. Here is a picture of our set up below.

In order to induce a current through these wires we needed our magnets to constantly be passing across these coils. And because would have the aid of wind we decided to have our magnets on a platform that would spin due to the wind rotating it. Our set up for this is below. 

So the magnets were set upon a spinning top, so that the wind would rotate this circle and keep the magnets passing through the coils. The magnets were also placed to directly line up with the coils so there was and equal passing through of coils. Ok now we have the two components that have potential to create a current. All we need now is something to catch the wind and rotate the magnet platform. So we used a water bottle to catch the wind from the fan and we built it so that no air would be wasted. Our wind catcher looked like this

When the bottle caught the wind the magnet base rotated over the coils and caused induced voltage through the wires and created current. All together this process ran pretty smoothly and looked like this...

Our wind turbine was able to generate .01 amps. Which is ok but not enough to light a light bulb... bummer! We would need much more ampage to light a bulb and to do this we could maybe create a stronger wind catcher. After this project I learned that the wind catcher is very important in creating voltage. Other turbines that had two wind catching fans created significantly more voltage than turbine like mine. Maybe this caused more rotation over the wires. But we went into this project with a well devised plan and everything worked well the first time. We did not have to try anything over, or remake any parts of the turbine, we learned from the last project that slow and steady crafting wins the race so we took our time compiling the materials. If I could do this project again I would probably change up the wind catching machine into a bi wind catcher in order to generate more voltage.