Aerodynamic Performance of a 100 W Single-Rotor Wind Turbine in Comparison with Multi-Rotor Wind Turbines of the Same Capacity

Abstract

Large-scale wind turbines come with great costs and logistic difficulties in transportation and installation. This work presents a solution by using Multi-Rotor Systems (MRS) wind turbines. Four different configurations of wind turbines with one, two, three, and four rotors of the same turbine capacity of 100 W have been studied. An in-house BEM code has been verified and used for the current study. The study has shown that the total mass of the rotor/nacelle assembly is 70%, 57%, and 50% for the twin-rotor, tri-rotor, and quad-rotor respectively as a percentage of the total mass of the single rotor. Torque load has also shown a significant decrease down to 50% of the quad-rotor compared to single-rotor showing the great advantage of MRS compared to single-rotor wind turbines. Based on the rotor/nacelle performance solely, increasing the number of rotors results in better performance with less mass and accordingly cost.