Computational and experimental study on horizontal-axis wind turbine slotted blade design
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Date
2018-05
Authors
Ling, Siok Mei
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Abstract
The exponentially growth of wind energy installations around the globe in the
decade has shown of the importance role of renewable energy in our community. The
optimisation of wind turbine technology is essential in term of increasing the feasibility
of costs, impact and productivity as the growing global demand on wind energy
production. The optimised topology design of wind turbine blade is expecting to
overcome the problem of relatively low wind speed exhibits in Malaysia in order to
meet the requirement of utility-scale wind power plant. The current works include the
development of unconventional slotted blade of three-blade arrangement horizontal axis wind turbine. The aerofoil shape is chosen according to National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) standard of 5 digit series. In this case, the
referencing aerofoil shape is NACA63-415. The slotted blade is also created based on
the previous research on the slotted flap on the aerofoil. The designing methodology of
this study is first using computer aided design modelling software to develop the model,
followed by utilizing a computational fluid dynamics software to simulate a two dimensional aerofoil. In the experiment, the blades are produced by using 3D rapid
prototyping and tested in an open-circuit wind tunnel. The comparison lift and drag
coefficient between improved design and standard blade are carried out experimentally
and numerically. The numerical results show that the lift coefficient of blade been
improved with achievable of maximum value, 0.2799 or 42.8% higher compared to
standard blade. Simultaneously, the drag of slotted blade also increased to a maximum
value of 0.04022 compared to standard blade of 0.01111. The overall aerodynamic
performance of slotted blade is lower than standard blade due to lower lift to drag
coefficient ratio. Additionally, for experimental results, the maximum lift coefficient of
slotted blade 0.2763. For standard blade, the maximum lift coefficient is 0.2600 which
slightly lower than slotted blade. Maximum drag coefficient of slotted blade is 0.4341
in contrast with standard blade coefficient that is 0.130.