I bet there is a grant you could get to cover R&D.
It might take some time. Don’t college professors devote lots of time to getting grants for their projects?
All thou, your model doesn't seem like it would be very complicated or expensive to build. You could use sheet metal for the tube. You might have to custom make you blades, but that should be too hard. If you know how to weld, that would be a big plus.
You could use an off the shelf generator. I wonder if an alternator would work.
For a patent, I don’t know if they have any rules about off the shelf components.