A team of six high school juniors from Chewonki Semester School won first place in the annual Maine Wind Blade Challenge at the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center laboratory in Orono May 1.
On that Saturday, 250 students representing 41 teams participated in the competition in which Maine student teams engineer, design, and build their own wind turbine blades. Winning scores are a combination of testing the blades to see which will create the most electricity and the team’s presentation of their design process.
This was the first year Chewonki has entered the Wind Blade Challenge.
Chewonki Sustainability Officer Tom Twist said the competition was fascinating. “The students learn about aerodynamics, materials, fabrication, and the process that engineers and industrial designers go through to find solutions,” Twist said. “We all will look at the Chewonki wind turbine a little differently now.”
Every team uses the same materials, provided by the laboratory. The Chewonki team engineered and designed their blades using small mock-up blades made of balsa wood. They then hand-carved the actual wind blades using traditional boat-building methods rather than more advanced technology.
On April 16, the team traveled to Brunswick to the Southern Maine Community College Composites Lab to learn how to apply fiberglass to the shaped-foam blades. They then began the work of checking performance and refining their blades.
Chewonki Sustainability Fellow Morgan Curtis, a recent graduate of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, said, “They were so excited. We knew that we had received a good energy score for the blades, but we didn’t know how we had done on the presentation. It was thrilling for all of us.”
“This group of students is really special,” Twist said. “More than winning or losing, they entered into the day, with all of its excitement, its stress, its highs and lows, with a very admirable openness and curiosity that was palpable. You could tell that win or lose, they were really savoring the whole experience.”
The participating students all elected to join the Wind Blade Challenge team, coached by Twist and Curtis. Team members were Madeline Vinh from The Northwest School in Seattle, Wash.; Molly Thayer from Belmont High School in Belmont, Mass.; Daniel Allen from the Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Los Angeles, Calif.; Gail Johnson from Waynflete School, Portland; Cortland Fischer from Middlebury Union High School in Salisbury, Vt.; and Nick Kaashoek from Lexington High School in Lexington, Mass.
The Chewonki semester school enrolls 42 accomplished high school juniors from public and independent schools nationwide for each spring and fall semester. These students complete a rigorous academic program designed for selective college admissions while also learning outdoors through Maine-based science, sustainability, and outdoor leadership curriculum.
For more information, visit www.chewonki.org.