含羞草传媒

U of T Engineering student team wins international prize with sustainable wind turbine

It鈥檚 the UTWind team鈥檚 second victory at the International Small Wind Turbine Contest, following their win in 2022
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From left to right: UTWind team members Robert Zhao, Joeun Yook, Micheal Jing, Dhara Patel, Alexis Terefenko, Justin Ding, Andre Li and Alex Chen (photo by Niels Adema)

A team of students from the 含羞草传媒鈥檚 Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering have earned top spot in the  with a design that utilized components from recycled pop bottles and plant-fibre composites.

The competition, which is hosted annually at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen in the Netherlands, challenges student teams to design and build a small-scale wind turbine for deployment in sub-Saharan Africa. Teams are evaluated on the overall energy yield of their turbine, the sustainability of their design, the quality of their construction and the presentation they give to the judges. 

The 's first-place finish saw them outcompete seven other teams from countries including Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands and Spain. This is the second time the team won the contest, following their debut performance in 2022.

Justin Ding, a second-year mechanical engineering student and incoming co-lead of UTWind's mechanical and manufacturing team, says the team made improvements to the pitch system for this year鈥檚 design and implemented more sustainable materials.

鈥淔or example, we used plant-based flax fibre composites to make the blades, which makes them lighter. The nose cone was made from recycled polyethylene terephthalate, or PET plastic, which is more sustainable than using new material,鈥 Ding says.

鈥淲e gathered plastic pop bottles from around campus, including the student-run Hard Hat Caf茅,鈥 says third-year mechanical engineering student Elena Sloan, the other co-lead of the mechanical and manufacturing team. 鈥淲e then cut these bottles into strips and extruded them through a heated nozzle to make 1.75 mm diameter filament, which we could use in our 3D printer.鈥 

Once the turbine was complete, it was disassembled and packed into four bags of checked luggage for the flight to the Netherlands. The team鈥檚 first stop was Delft, where their turbine underwent testing in a wind tunnel at Delft University of Technology鈥檚 Open Jet Facility. 

The testing showed that the team was able to harvest about 36 per cent of the available energy at a wind speed of 8.5 metres per second, a solid, but not outstanding result. 

From there, the team members took a three-hour train ride across the country to Groningen, where they gave their technical presentation, followed by the awards ceremony. 

鈥淲e didn鈥檛 really expect to win best overall, but we thought we had a decent chance at winning for the most sustainable design,鈥 says Dhara Patel, incoming co-president of UTWind and a second-year electrical engineering student. 

鈥淲hen we found out we didn鈥檛 win that award, we were pretty devastated, but it was a complete shock to then find out that we won the whole competition 鈥 our mouths just hung open for a while.鈥 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Going forward, Patel says the team would like to try building a vertical-axis turbine in addition to their standard horizontal-axis version. 鈥淰ertical-axis turbines look really cool, and they are structurally simpler and have a lower profile than horizontal-axis ones,鈥 she says. 

鈥淥nly one other team has tried that. We鈥檇 like to take on that challenge, and ultimately put one on our own campus buildings to generate clean wind power.鈥 

Patel was a high school student when UTWind won their first competition in 2022, and says reading about their success was one of the things that inspired her to study engineering at U of T. The team she eventually came to co-lead now includes more than 50 engineering students as well as some from the Faculty of Arts & Science.

Students are divided into five sub-teams: aerodynamics, mechanical and manufacturing, control systems, power systems and sustainability. 

The team members say they鈥檙e energized by their win, and have big plans for next year.

鈥淲e鈥檝e learned so many lessons 鈥 before, during and after the contest,鈥 says Robert Zhao, UTWind's other incoming co-president and an undergraduate student in the department of physics.

鈥淏ut our competitors have also learned those lessons, and there are more of them than ever before. We need to improve our winning design, making it more robust and more mature to better defend our title.鈥 

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