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blueEnergy @ MIT
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By gibsonfvse, Section Wind
Posted on Wed May 18, 2005 at 05:37:42 PM MST
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blueEnergy came to MIT for wind tunnel testing and a lecture (note: long, many pics)
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| blueEnergy is a non-profit wind turbine company that currently does work with microwind power in Nicaragua. Some of you may remember a post from cofounder Mathias Craig some time ago. Well, I had the great honor and pleasure of hosting Mathias Craig, his associate director (and brother) Guillaume Craig, and his technology director Darin Bird at MIT last week for wind turbine testing and a public lecture. Mathias is an MIT alum (Civil and Environmental Engineering S.M. 2003), and I wanted to bring him here to talk about what it's like to work in the "real world," where academic knowledge can be difficult to implement.
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On Monday (May 9), we hopped into the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel (ca. 1914), which has a 7x9 foot elliptical test section. blueEnergy is currently flying 8-foot Piggott-style machines in Nicaragua, but of course an 8-foot machine wouldn't fit in the tunnel. They opted for a 4-foot Piggott-style machine "on loan" from Ian Woofenden of Solar Energy International. Mathias had this to say about the testing in his report to the blueEnergy email list:
Monday afternoon we had the opportunity to test a 4 ft diameter machine in the MIT Wright Brothers wind tunnel. That was a blast. Dick Perdichizzi, the operator of the wind tunnel, was very generous with his time and helped us set up the turbine for testing. Interesting fact: the wind tunnel draws 2 megawatts of power and Dick has to call the local powerplant to warn them when he is going to fire it up.
The machine we tested was much smaller than what we make in Nicaragua but we decided to use it because our machine would not fit in the tunnel. The machine was a Hugh Piggott design and on loan from Ian Woofenden of Solar Energy International and Hugh himself. We had some difficulty acquiring a good battery on campus to provide a load for the turbine and Guillaume and I ended up running around Cambridge in search of a car shop - typical blueEnergy style. We did find an auto repair place and convinced them to rent us a new battery for a few hours.
The tunnel work was quit fun and the results are summarized in the "MIT_windTunnel_4ft.xls" file. This gist of it is that we produced power curves under two scenarios: one with the tail clamped to prevent furling, and one with the tail free to pivot. In both cases we took measurements as the turbine was speeding up and as it was slowing down because of the differing behaviors in these two approaches.
Several people have questioned the scientific merit of the measurements given the size of the turbine relative to the tunnel and given that wind tunnels don't accurately reflect real-world conditions. Of course both of these criticisms are valid and we advise all to take the results with a large grain of salt. We did these tests largely to take advantage of the unique opportunity to use the MIT wind tunnel and to gain some practice making power curves.
You can see the results in the spreadsheet file that I've posted to my webspace, "MIT_windTunnel_4ft.xls". Just some excerpts from it:
In the third image, you can clearly see where the turbine started to furl.
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On Tuesday, May 10th, the three guys hosted a public "lecture" on campus. They covered many things: the social conditions in Nicaragua that led to its poverty, Mathias' and Guillaume's mother's linguistics work with the Rama natives (blueEnergy now has a turbine flying in the Rama community), blueEnergy's business aspects and partnership, the turbine setup and wiring, and more. They were recording the lecture on video, but the camera failed and destroyed the footage. It's still possible that they may salvage something or post the presentation itself somewhere; maybe. The main purpose of the lecture, though, was to give us academic types an idea of how to help other people when one has to learn everything from a new language to a new way of living -on top- of all that business-like and mathematical stuff. This event was probably the highlight of my semester, as I've been wanting to bring Mathias back to MIT for over a year. And now for the real goodies: pictures and video clips!
The guys and tunnel operator Dick Perdichizzi check out the turbine.
Drilling a hole for mounting the turbine in the tunnel floor (see a short video clip here [AVI, 1.8 meg])
Aerodynamicist Dr. Mark Drela (of Daedalus and Decavitator fame) peeks in to see what's going on.
The tunnel mouth.
The turbine mounted in the tunnel.
"We're firing it up!" The tunnel's motor draws 2 megawatts, so MIT's cogeneration plant must be warned in advance before it is turned on. Before MIT's cogeneration plant was built, the load would cause voltage levels to drop across Cambridge (so I heard from Dick, if I heard correctly). The tunnel's fan is a constant-speed variable pitch propeller. Apparentl 400 miles per hour is possible, but the noise would probably propagate throughout Cambridge as well!
The turbine running. See a short video clip here (AVI, 2.3 meg)
The turbine furled.
The WBWT control panel. See a clip of tunnel operations here (AVI, 3.9 meg)
Guillaume and Darin in MIT's Killian Court.
Dinner at Legal Seafoods in Kendall Square!
I hope all of you enjoyed this; sorry for the very long post. More pictures and a poster can be seen on my MIT webspace at http://web.mit.edu/~csequeir/www/be/. Special thanks to: MIT Student Pugwash, Students for Global Sustainability, Design that Matters, MIT Energy Club, AID-MIT, Technology and Policy Student Society, Public Service Center, Edgerton Center, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and MIT's Large Event Fund. |
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