1.37W Eiffel-Tower Inspired Wind Turbine

A small-scale horizontal-axis wind turbine pairing a multi-objective optimized rotor with an Eiffel Tower-inspired lattice support. The three-blade NACA 23012 rotor was generated by a custom Python framework that couples XFOIL with Blade Element Momentum theory and an NSGA-II evolutionary algorithm, sweeping blade count, tip-speed ratio, angle of attack, and chord/twist distributions against a Pareto front of Cp and root bending moment. The final geometry lands on TSR 4.6 and a 3.86° design angle of attack, with twist tapering from 17° at the root to 3.2° at the tip. The tapered lattice tower was scaled from JHU's Eiffel Tower references and split into three sections to fit a 9x9x9 inch print volume and 17 in³ material budget. SolidWorks FEA under a 1 kgf load predicted 0.51 mm peak displacement and 2.79×10⁷ N/m² peak von Mises stress near the upper mount. Bench loading from 9.81 to 98.1 N gave a load-deflection slope of 0.0101 mm/N with R² = 0.995, putting effective stiffness around 99 N/mm and confirming the structure stayed elastic across the full range. A destruction test eventually failed at the glued interface between the upper and lower sections. The printed rotor itself underperformed because the as-printed blades came out flatter than the CAD model, so power characterization fell back to a reference rotor that peaked at 1.374 W at 5441 RPM in a 25 MPH wind. The optimization was sound; the slicer was not. Team: ENGIN 26 Group 9

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