NC State engineering students monitor wind at Whirligig Park

North Carolina State University engineering students will place sensors on one of the whirligigs at Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park to study the source of wind that powers the structure and to see how efficiently the whirligig is moving.

On Wednesday, the students met with the conservationists who spent years restoring the kinetic sculptures after they were disassembled from Simpson’s Lucama farm and before they were installed at the downtown Wilson park.

“For this project, our main goal is to be able to provide a network of sensors that can give a data set that can be used in the museum for educational purposes and provide some sort of rudimentary risk analysis system for the conservation teams so they can know if there is a whirligig that needs to be looked at,” said Connor Raines, an electrical engineering student at N.C. State.

The experimental sensors will be mounted on BBB Blue Star, which was one of the first whirligigs to be placed in the park.

At 35-feet, BBB Blue Star is one of the largest whirligigs in the park and  has 6-inch reflectors on its fan and vane.

“That is the best turning one out there,” said conservationist Joe Justice.

The whirligig is located near the southwest side of the park, which is about 300 feet from the left field fence, and will be about 700 feet from home plate at the new baseball stadium being constructed at the corner of Goldsboro and Hines streets

One sensor will measure tilt, while another measures vibration.

A third will be mounted near the hub that rotates in the wind.

“It will have magnets mounted on the inside,” Raines said. “The sensors detect magnetic fields, so we will be counting how many times the magnetic field changes to estimate the rotation speed.”

Data from the sensors will be transmitted by radio to a “gateway” that will send the information to a computer in the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park Museum and Gift Shop, located across Goldsboro Street from the park.

Raines said the system could eventually be used for a rudimentary risk analysis.

“If it is vibrating out of bounds, we can send a ping message somewhere to say, maybe something is off-balance,” Raines said.

Student Thomas Van said the sensors run off common AA batteries.

“They are running off of microcontrollers that have been preprogrammed because they are industrial sensors,” Van said. “We didn’t build these ourselves or anything, but they meet our specifications.” The indicator may tell conservationists that the whirligig needs to be examined.

“We are witnesses of the birthing of a new whirligig technology,” said Joe Justice, one of the three conservationists who met with the students.

Data gathered by the sensors will be presented on the Whirligig Park website and be accessible to the general public.

“It is certainly going to reach out to a group of people that might not otherwise be interested,” Justice said.

Roy Palmer, executive director for the park, said BBB Blue Star is going to be the most immediately affected by the construction of the new baseball stadium next to the park because of its location.

“What we are going to have is about eight months until the stadium is finished,” Palmer said. “We’ll have the data set for those eight months. Once the stadium complex is together, we should be able to see how that has affected them.”

The stadium is just one piece of the puzzle, and it wasn’t the driving force for this project. The recent demolition of Farmers Warehouse changed the wind pattern at the park, he said.

Wilson-based Bartlett Engineering & Surveying is a project sponsor.

David Via, a project engineer from Bartlett Engineering and Surveying, is on the board of the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park.

Other N.C. State students participating include computer engineering students Mario Rosas and Jackson Toburen.

The team will first be working on design for mounting brackets using whirligigs at N.C. State as models.

“We will also be doing a lot of tests simulating the whirligigs at N.C. State just to make sure we know the full capabilities of these sensors before we put them 30 feet in the air,” Raines said. “We plan to have it on BBB Bluestar before May.”

Conservationist Mel Bowen said the sensors will have an opportunity to take baseline measurements before the stadium gets to a point in construction that it will affect the wind moving through the whirligig park.