hello all,
we are working on a project for a high school engineering competition.
we need to generate electricity by harnessing the wind power from a floor box fan, then store that energy and use it to power a vehicle carrying a load (weight).
After some experimenting we have found that we can store a charge onto some capacitors and use that to power a small dc motor to run the vehicle.
Using 10F (2.3V) super caps we can run a little 3V motor for 5 minutes or so (we rigged two caps in series and two series sets in parallel) If we understand this right that should give us roughly 5+ volts with higher amps?
However the charging at this point has only come from a power supply.
Our question is this: What would be the best way to harness the wind power to charge the capacitors? (the charging and vehicle run must take place within 5 minutes.)
We have tried using 12V computer fans/motors. With the floor fan set on high, we can at best get 2V from one comp fan. We tried rigging two series sets of 3 minifans in parallel to get close to 6V at unknown amps. This takes forever to charge the 10F capacitors....
Are the 12V motors a bad choice, if we can only spin them fast enough to generate 2V? Would it be better to run say a little 3V motor to generate the 2V?
We need some help to figure out this last hurdle...
Thanks a million!