Posted in: Wind Turbine Lab
November 15, 2017
Dr. Adeel Khalid, Associate Professor of Systems Engineering at Kennesaw State University, is providing students a unique hands-on experience with Turbine Technologies' WindLabTM product. WindLabTM is a scaled wind turbine electric generator. It features a planetary gearbox and three rapid prototyped blades that drive a 3-phase electric alternator.
Included electronic models support development of student-designed turbine blades. Multiple variants can be installed, tested and compared to the baseline factory blades. This process inherently introduces participants to many aerodynamic performance topics.
Christopher Douglas Roper, an undergraduate senior of Dr. Khalid's, is enrolled in a dual-degree program with the University of West Georgia and Kennesaw State University (formally Southern Polytechnic State University). He is double majoring in physics and mechanical engineering with minors both in aerospace engineering and mathematics and co-authored a paper regarding the educational use of Kennesaw State's WindLab system.
Mr. Roper stated that this undergraduate activity "allows a student to go through a complete engineering design cycle. They start with a baseline wind turbine and calculate the lift and drag using analytical methods. The values are then compared with corresponding wind turbine blades designed using CAD and CFD software. Validation is performed to ensure that the CFD software is calibrated. Various wind turbine parameters are changed and power extracted values are calculated. This allows the undergraduate student to experience a complete engineering research process".
Check out their WindLabTM turbine blade optimization paper here: