As manager of group for the project, I was tasked with creating a Gantt Planner of the entire project. During Milestone 0 of the project, I created a preliminary planner to outline how the project timeline should look, and then I revisited it as milestones moved forwards to update date and duration counts for the planner. Attached below are two images, the first being the preliminary Gantt Planner, and the second the finalized version as the project was completed.
Figure 1. Preliminary Gantt Planner.
Figure 2. Finalized Gantt Planner.
Throughout the duration of the project, I worked with Rownaq Azom, Edward Ling, Shangrui (Cruz) Wu, and Izza Hammad. I served as the project manager and facilitated meetings that were held outside of class, as well as provided leadership to the group whenever necessary. During meetings outside of classes, we mainly discussed any work that was assigned for completion
Design a mechanism that drives a system that converts the kinetic energy of the wind into electrical energy for the Swedish Wind Energy Association. It should respond easily to varying wind conditions, environmentally friendly, and mindful of the waste it produces as well as of the surrounding environment; it should be chemically inert and resistant to forces of nature it will encounter. The product should also easily reproducible, cost-effective, and efficient.
— Finalized problem statement
We began by defining a refined problem statement for the blade, then created an objective tree to find the attributes of the blade that were most important; we selected what we determined to be the most important attributes and created criteria for MPIs to maximize the efficiency and minimize the carbon footprint.
Table 1. MPI for Stiffness and Strength Optimizing for Primary and Secondary Objectives
From this we used ANSYS Granta EduPack to find the top 3 materials from our criteria, using charts similar to the one below.
Figure 3. Sample MPI Chart with Top-ranking Materials Listed to the Right.
After creating graphs for each MPI derivation, we listed the top 5 candidates from each criterion, from where we chose the three materials that appeared most frequently or towards the top of the rankings for each chart. The top three materials ended up being low alloy steel, CFRP, and bamboo.
We then created and used a weighted decision matrix to decide which of the three was the best material to use going forwards.
Table 2. Weighted Decision Matrix and Scores of Top Three Materials
As shown in the table above, low alloy steel scored the best and was selected as the material to use going forwards.
Finally, after selecting the material, we were given two designs for the turbine blade to work with: a compliant design, to be used with materials that had Young's moduli lower than 100 GPa; and a stiffer design, for materials with Young's moduli higher than that value. Low alloy steel has an average Young's modulus of 205 GPa, so the stiff design was selected. We needed to determine a thickness for the blade so that its deflection fell between 8.5 - 10 mm. We began by calculating by hand deflections for a set of thicknesses (15, 30, 50, and 150 mm), then determined two thicknesses that met closest that range. For our design, a thickness between 15 - 30 mm covered the given deflection range the closest. From there, we used Stress Analysis on Inventor to fine-tune thickness values within that range to get a deflection exactly within the given deflection range. We decided upon a thickness of 28 mm as it had a deflection of 8.83 mm —it was one of the higher thicknesses that fell within the thickness range, which meant less material could be cut out to make the blade, reducing waste and helping the environment in the process.
Figure 4. Deflection Calculation by Hand for a Given Thickness.
Figure 5. Deflection Testing for a Thickness of 28 mm.