Small-Scale Wind Turbine Design Concept

This document presents a proposed concept of a small-scale wind turbine to operate a portable radio receiver in Chuuk State, Micronesia. Consisting of tropical islands, Chuuk State is frequently struck by typhoons every season of the year. These persistent waves of harsh weather facilitate the need for effective communication between the Micronesian government and its residents. Radio communication is one way the government can effectively relay daily weather updates and instructions during emergency conditions to the people of Micronesia. Taking this need for effective communication in Micronesia into account, this document proposes a small-scale wind turbine concept that can power a portable radio receiver throughout the year. We started the design process by specifying and quantifying our customer needs and accompanying metrics. Then, we created a function structure and system decomposition which allowed our team to properly analyze the functions and elements involved in our design and the components needed to achieve the target specifications. Once we established our system decomposition, we start generating concepts for individual sub-functions using different concept generation methods. Using screening and scoring methods, our team selected a concept for our small-scale wind turbine. Our design features a beveled Archimedes spiral and one-support structure with planetary gear transmission. After we selected our best concept, we calculated the overall efficiency to be approximately 16 percent, which seems reasonable for a small-scale wind turbine given the requirements. As we selected our concept, our team started building the CAD models for all the essential parts using SolidWorks.