Hey everyone, I’m Kris. I’m a high school student going to study mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech in the fall, and am interested in pretty much anything that moves. I’ve been part of FIRST robotics (usfirst.org) since I was a freshman in high school, and after stumbling upon this site (after the ted talk was posted on reddit) I became really interested.
All high school seniors in PA are required to participate in the senior project experience, which is three weeks to do something and give a presentation. I originally wanted to build a windmill, but after hearing about this site, I decided I wanted to be able to share my designs, Inventor models, and design notebook with the community.
I’m planning on building a Savonius wind turbine, because it’s cheap and simple to construct. While those are nice characteristics for me, I also believe these characteristics are important to anyone who would be building one of these. The downside to them is that their not efficient (I’ve seen them rated as low as 30% efficiency) which could force me to give up and work on a different type of windmill, if I really don’t believe that it’s worthwhile to build this one. I'm trying to fix this problem by getting higher RPM's using a gearbox, and am planning on reading up on how to make electric motors, to see if i can do produce as many volts as possible.
Well anyway, thanks for reading, and I look forward to posting more about my project.