Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi my name is Shelby,
Me and my friends have been entered by our teacher into the inland regional science fair. We are doing our project on wind turbines and we were wondering if our question for our project has already been answered or not here is it, Can we make a better wind turbine design? My teacher suggested that we try six different wind turbine designs and see which is the best. We are wondering if that has already been done or not, and if so do you have any other ideas?

Thank You,
Sincerely,
Shelby Andrade

Windmill designs sound like a lot of fun. There are traditional windmill types with different numbers of blades, vertical ones, horizontal ones and maybe you can come up with a new one of your own. You'll need a way of measuring their effectiveness too - connect them to a generator, blow air from a fan at them perhaps?

People do studies like that all the time at engineering companies to come up with new designs. Maybe you'll come up with something that no one has ever seen before. That would be cool.

Howard