Abstract

The present work is to design a passive pitch-control mechanism for small horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) to generate stable power at high wind speeds. The mechanism uses a disk pulley as an actuator to passively adjust the pitch angle of blades by centrifugal force. For this design, aerodynamic braking is caused by the adjustment of pitch angles at high wind speeds. As a marked advantage, this does not require mechanical brakes that would incur electrical burn-out and structural failure under high speed rotation. This can ensure the survival of blades and generator in sever operation environments. In this paper, the analysis uses blade element momentum theory (BEMT) to develop graphical user interface software to facilitate the performance assessment of the small-scale HAWT using passive pitch control (PPC). For verification, the HAWT system was tested in a full-scale wind tunnel for its aerodynamic performance. At low wind speeds, this system performed the same as usual, yet at high wind speeds, the equipped PPC system can effectively reduce the rotational speed to generate stable power.

Highlights

  • Nowadays, it has been widely recognized that wind is one of the promising green energy sources for its non-regional availability

  • Our blade design is based on blade element momentum theory (BEMT), which has been widely applied in industry for the blade design flowchart collating the blade design process according to [21,22]

  • There are several designs of passive pitch control proposed over the years

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Summary

Introduction

It has been widely recognized that wind is one of the promising green energy sources for its non-regional availability. When operating beyond the critical wind speed, the system will be at the risk of over-running due to a rapid rise of receiving excessive wind power Another approach proposed by Xie et al [7,8] was to design a folding blade of turbine rotor, controlled by a servo motor [7] or a passive mechanism regulation [8]. The present work aims to design a disk pulley mechanism for a prototype of a small-scale HAWT system to passively control the blade pitch angle such that the system is capable of outputting stable power at over rated wind speeds.

Theoretical Modeling of Blade Design
GUI of Blade Performance Development
Performance
Mechanical
Principle of Motion
Experiment of ABRIof
Findings
Conclusions
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