Top row, from left: Matthew Bryan, Alex Dzewaltowski, Jacob McAfee, Dr. Warren White. Next row, from left: Justice Catron, Tyler Kodanaz, Simon Cibulka. Next row, from left: Will Brownlee, Jackson Jennings, Aswini Patro. Next row, from left: Alex Feldkamp, Jevin Peitzmeier, Robert Small. Front row, from left: Joel Pegg, Sam Wilson, Justin Mann.

TEAM NAME

Wildcat Wind Power

GAME PLAN

Wildcat Wind Power (WWP) is an organization at Kansas State University designed to involve students in the application and development of clean wind energy. Our team works through every step in the design process to create a working, creative, and, it is hoped, efficient wind turbine. We strive to use the Collegiate Wind Competition as a way to develop practical skills for our members that can used out in any professional setting.

The team at large is further broken into smaller groups with more focused goals. These include electrical, mechanical, business, and siting. On the electrical side we teach our younger members how to solder, read and design digital circuits, and use design software. Meanwhile the older members focus more on optimizing the circuit and testing our generators to create the best turbine possible. On the mechanical side, we use our department’s 3D printers to test numerous blade profiles. The business side has been utilizing decision matrices to come up with a sound business pitch for our turbine use as well as create a comprehensive report for how it can be done. The siting team has been hard at work analyzing wind data for the surrounding region to find the best location for a wind farm. With that said, we at WWP hope to submit a unique and competent design that will impress our peers.

TEAM STRENGTHS

We have a diverse group of students with a variety of focuses and disciplines from electrical, mechanical, and computer engineering to outside thecollege of engineering. Business, entrepreneur, and computer science majors are all working and learning from each other. This diversity has helped our team grow and move forward using unique and out of the box thinking, which is particularly crucial when trying to produce a truly innovative wind turbine

TEAM HURDLES

We have faced a lot of challenges this year because of the graduation of our senior members and leadership from previous years. Our underclassmen had to learn quickly to keep in line with the design schedule. On top of those regular yearly difficulties, we’ve also had to cope with losing our research and testing lab. Our workspace was moved into another room an eighth the size of the previous workspace. In order to test our turbine designs using our homemade wind tunnel, we had to modify it with wheels in order to easily roll it in and out of storage. We also had to modify the tunnel to run off a lower 240 volts (V), as we no longer had access to our regular 480 V outlet. That involved a redesign of the electrical components of our tunnel requiring financial investment and effort from our team.

COLLEGIATE WIND COMPETITION OBJECTIVES

We hope to walk away from the 2018 Collegiate Wind Competition with the useful experience of completing a design process and ending with a successful final product. We would also hope that all our members gain useful skills and an understanding of working with large, multidisciplinary groups that they can take with them into their professional lives and form professional connections that will be of mutual benefit.

This webpage was submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy by the team.