Design of micro scale wind turbine blade for low wind speed applications

Abstract

Renewable energy sources play an important role due to the increasing economic, social, and environmental issues caused by the use of fossil fuels. In this work, wind power can be considered as an effective renewable energy resource. The main objective of this research is to design a micro-scale Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) that may be mounted on rooftops or moving vehicles. The proposed wind turbine model was designed using Q blade software. The five-blade wind turbine was used for the design due to the increased efficiency, especially under low wind speed conditions. Then the wind turbine was validated under varied wind speed conditions. The derived optimum parameters for the five-blade wind turbine were 0.39 m blade length, 0.04 m hub radius, and 6 tip-speed ratio. The wind turbine has a 65W power output, with 0.45 of power coefficient at 6 m/s, wind speed.