Design and development of robust turbine blades for a small scale wind turbine

• Main Author: Nurul Fateha Binti Abd Kadir, Ms.
• Format: text::Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2023

This thesis describes the design and development of robust turbine blades for a small scale wind turbine. Rotor blade is one of the important components in a wind turbine. This thesis focuses on a small scale Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) for roof mounted application specifically for low wind speeds environment in Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN), Kajang, Selangor. The design and development intends to observe the effects of a few parameters towards its capability to produce the high number of rotation. Parameters considered include curvature radius, wind speeds, number of blades and type of material. 2-Dimensional (2D) models are designed and developed with ANSYS Fluent software. The curvature radius is set up to 0 m, 0.105 m, 0.21m, and 0.42 m. A 3.0 m/s constant wind speed is set to be minimum value and tested in range of 3 m/s to 8 m/s to observe the effect of different curvature radius to steady fluid flows with specific boundary conditions. Next, 3-Dimensional (3D) models are subjected to constant load for full blades, to observe the effect of different type of material to number of blades. The same 3D models are then simulated to observe their performance with different materials. In conclusion, rotor with 3 full blades that have no curvature radius and 0.42 m of curvature radius using alloy steel are found to be most robust and has the most suitable values of angular speeds for small scale applications. Further investigations are suggested for future prototyping to validate and visualise the results and observations.