In their first-ever competition, UTWind — a team of undergraduate and graduate students from U of T Engineering — has taken the top prize in an international challenge to design and build a small-scale wind turbine.
“While we always strived to be a competitive team from the beginning and knew that we had a strong design, we definitely didn’t expect to win first place,” says David Petriw (Year 3 MSE), a member of UTWind.
“The morale of the team is at an all-time high, and we are going to celebrate this win in a big way!”
The International Small Wind Turbine Contest (ISWTC) is hosted annually by Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, Netherlands. To clinch first place, UTWind edged out teams from Denmark, Germany, Poland and Egypt.
“The goal of ISWTC is to build and demonstrate a wind turbine designed for rural regions in Sub-Saharan Africa,” says Andrew Ilersich (UTIAS PhD candidate), aerodynamics lead for UTWind.
“Every aspect of our design had to be tailored to, or at least compatible with, the region it would be sold and operated in. We also had to show that our design was sustainable, being made from recyclable, low-cost, and locally available materials.”
Full article: UTWind places first at the International Small Wind Turbine Contest