Heather tests the turbine on Twin Peaks

‘Tis the season of no wind. And while it’s freezing cold outside, the sky is clear and annoyingly calm. In a desperate attempt to put some mileage on the Wind Turbine testing unit, a few of us drive up to Twin Peaks and draw a small crowd while we assemble our girl for testing. No wind — as the internet predicted.

(On the plus side, we captured some beautiful shots of the turbine with an SF backdrop!)

The testing unit (pictured above) is three plywood disks with blue plastic blades sandwiched inbetween. This arrangement is solely to enable quick-and-easy profile changes. Our objective: to experiment with the blade spacing, curvature, and width. A DAQ is connected to an anemometer, a force guage, and a tachometer collecting wind speed, force, and turbine rpm, respectively. From this info, the DAQ plots torque vs wind speed for each blade arrangement.

It’s week six or so of absolutely zero wind. We’ve exhausted our contacts trying to find a wind tunnel at Stanford, Berkeley, NASA-Ames, SLAC, etc. Time to play God and create our own wind. To build a wind tunnel, or to build a car mount system? While the latter would make for some hilarious visuals, a wind tunnel would bring consistency to testing. How easy is it to build a wind tunnel? No idea. We’ll find out. I’m convinced it can’t be that difficult — in fact, according to Heather’s highly technical sketch all we need is a plywood box and some fairly enormous fans (hmm, McMaster-Carr?). Now… where to store a wind tunnel?