UBC Sustaingineering

UBC Sustaingineering is a Student Design Team at UBC, a team focused on building sustainable technologies. I was a member of this team for a year and transitioned into Co-Mechanical Team Lead into my senior year.

The Problem

Our partner organization in Nicaragua wanted to build a wind turbine out of local recycled materials, to show that energy is accessible anywhere, and to empower their community to become less dependent on a dangerous and unreliable electric grid. Our partner wanted a turbine which could be built on top of a school and power most of the major electronics within, which included lights and some small appliances.

The Progress

I lead the Mechanical team to develop one of our first prototypes, which was built using spare wood and some bike parts. Because this project extended into COVID pandemic, most of our work had to transition online, utilizing CAD and FEA. Through research and some CAD development, we built a proposed prototype of our wind turbine:

We chose the vertical axis turbine due to its simplicity in both operation, installation, and manufacturing. Because it doesn’t require directionality, and generally is less dangerous if it fails, we felt this would be most appropriate to build out of repurposed materials for a community without access to cutting-edge technology.

Meanwhile, I worked with a group of other students to develop a gear train for the wind turbine based on motors and wind data which we estimated based on reading provided by our partner organization. We scoped and performed failure and fatigue analysis on the mechanical components, while ensuring it would be retained and lubricated properly. While this gearbox may have been too expensive and complex for our partner organization, it gave us a good idea of how the ultimate gearbox should be constructed.

Before I graduated UBC, the turbine team was able to build a rudimentary prototype of the turbine and attached it to a small motor to generate a few Watts of energy. Since my tenure, the turbine project has further developed and is aimed for a completion sometime next year.