UTWind Small Scale Wind Turbine

Who We Are

We are a group of engineering students at the University of Toronto trying to design and build a small-scale wind turbine! We have 5 technical subsystems: aerodynamics, mechanical, power systems, controls, and sustainability. We began operations in late 2020, and are hoping to compete at the International Small Wind Turbine Contest in the Netherlands in June 2022.

Pitch Control

One of the cool features of our turbine is the active pitch control system, which contains a PCB inside the hub that is rotating, communicating via a slip ring to another PCB on the main chassis of the turbine! Inside the hub there are motors and sensors that control the pitch angle of the blade, which is crucial to startup performance! The picture below shows a transparent hub with the slip ring in the foreground. A green PCB is visible just inside, which mounts the position control sensors and controllers for the motors. The motors are located on the right side

Sustainability

Our turbine is 1.6 m diameter, and our rated power is about 600W. We plan to machine the blades from wood, to make them biodegradable. Sustainability is a large component of the competition, and we have kept in mind throughout much of the material the turbine. This tweaks the tip speed ratio to draw as much power as possible from the wind.

Power Systems

The current through this converter is very high, but we implemented it on a PCB! You can see the very thick traces to handle the high current. At the top of the board is the 3-phase input from the generator. It then passes through a parallel active/passive bridge rectifier, with a large capacitor for a peak rectifier on the top right.

Two voltage sensors are on the left, around a connector to another PCB. The high power trace goes through a current sensor and then may be routed via a switch straight through to the output, or into a buck/boost controller. The inductor takes up most of the bottom right of the screen.

Contact Us

We do not have our documents on a public sharing system; however, if you would like to see any of our designs in more detail, we would be happy to share them with you! Send us an email at myutwind@gmail.com or visit our website at www.utwind.com. We would love to share our designs with the sponsorship community! A sponsorship from PCBWay would be important to helping us achieve our goals, as our entire project is funded by University grants and corporate sponsorships.