Abstract
The effect of blade number on small Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) has been studied experimentally and numerically in this research. The turbine blade is made of a flat metal sheet and the tip was formed to shape a winglet. The 5-blades turbine was tested inside a wind tunnel for performance investigation at different wind speeds. The experiment was conducted under various wind speed, i.e. 3.5 m/s, 3.9 m/s, 4.3 m/s, 4.6 m/s dan 5 m/s. Furthermore, three wind turbines geometry with different blade number (3, 4, and 5 blades) were built for numerical study purpose by using Ansys Fluent and the results were compared to the experimental one. The results show that the blade number does increase the wind turbine torque and there is also more power generated from the turbine with more blade numbers since torque is related to pressure. Moreover, the winglet helps the blade to retain the flow and increases the pressure on the blade surface. However, the experimental measurements obtained were smaller than the numerical predictions about 50% on the average since more unidentified losses existed and not accounted for the calculation.
Highlights
The demand for electrical energy continuously grows every year [1], it was projected that world energy demand would increase by approximately 50% between 2018 and 2050 [2]
The results show that the pressure, power, and torque increased as the higher blade number since torque is the summation of pressure and viscous stress integration [18]
Similar results have been reported to show that the higher number of blade turbine has a better performance [10], [12], [19]
Summary
The demand for electrical energy continuously grows every year [1], it was projected that world energy demand would increase by approximately 50% between 2018 and 2050 [2]. 85% of the world's energy consumption depends on fossil fuels, the principal CO2 emission source [3], [4]. The fossil fuel industry, as the primary producer and consumer of energy, is the leading contributor to climate change. Petroleum-based fuels are nonrenewable, and the reserves continuously depleted. In order to fulfill the demand, humans must find other sources of energy that more eco-friendly to depend on. Electrical generation from renewable energy will be a prospective solution to fulfill the demand since the sources were abundant [5]
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