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[VAWT] Awarded!

So I wrote applications for a competition for bachelors thesises at Chalmers University of Technology, called Bachelors Challenge.  After passing two steps of selection, we got to present our concept in front of a public audience and a jury consisting of representants from Chalmers and various companies, including the internationally famous Ångpanneföreningen. We competed in the category "Green Initiative and Sustainable Development".

Madeleine, another person from our six person team and I held the presentation. Competition was hard. One of the competitors for instance presented a concept for converting plant matter that is wasted today into useful plastics.

To our help Jens and Madeleine, from our  group consisting of six persons, built a model of the windturbine. As we couldn't find a suitable source of wind we decided to spin the turbine with a DC motor instead. Then we used my previously designed software to make an onscreen live demonstration of the performance, with and without the maximum-power-point tracking algorithm that was designed. Below is a picture from this part of the demonstration.  I'm the guy in the middle. 

Demonstrating the equipment live

We used the exact same electronics that I designed as for the real two meters high turbine. It measures the actual electrical power. It was kind of challenge to get everything finnished for the presentation, as we had to hand in the final report just a few days before the competition. However, with the investment of quiet a lot of hours everything worked out fine. We had just about  a minute to carry out the table with all equipment and get it to work, after the preceding group had done their presentation.

Other keypoints of the demonstration were possible applications, were we proposed the use in development countries. Here, empty kerosene barrels could be turned into savoniusturbines. Instead of using expensive and unhealthy kerosene for illumination as still is a common case, savionusturbines and LED's could be used. Our research and calculations showed that it would be a lot lot cheaper. 

We won a check worth around 2000 euros

Afterward there was a break, and the jury summoned to decide the winner. What a moment when that turned out to be us! The night went on to a delicious three-course dinner.  It was a great project with a great group and I learned a lot. 

After that, I went on an exchange semester abroad and haven't been able to continue on this project. However, the turbine was left logging data on an SD card, and I'll try to mine out some important results when getting home again. 

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