Wind Turbines

Daniel Miranian
Period-7
Journal 4-2

I. I found that ferromagnetism only has to do with objects that can remain magnetic even after they are removed from a magnetic field. Most objects that are ferromagnetic have iron in them. Paramagnetism on the other hand is a form of magnetism that occurs only when in the presence of another magnetic field. Only certain elements or compounds can be paramagnetic. It depends on the number of valence electrons that element has. An element that has 3 lone pair valence electrons will be more paramagnetic than an element with only 2 lone pair valence electrons.

II. This past week in class we started to build our wind turbines. We decided to use Styrofoam lunch trays to construct our blades because they are very lightweight and rather strong. When we actually tested our wind turbine I was surprised at how well ours actually worked. We originally designed it to work with only 3 blades. However, for our experiment we are going to use 1, 2, 3, and 4 blades to see which works the best. With 3 blades we were able to light up an LED. We could not get the LED to light up with our 4 blade design. We will continue to test our wind turbine next week. I think it will be interesting to see which number of blades actually produces the most power. I also think it will be cool to see how well one blade actually works.

III. For next week I would like to find out more information on wind turbines that only have one blade.