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A practical blade manufacturing technique for a wind-turbine design project in a renewable energy engineering course

1 Abstract

A blade design project for a horizontal-axis wind-turbine was developed for a renewable energy course. The objective of the project was to design a set of blades for a turbine rotor to extract the maximum amount of power from a given 12 m/s wind speed while being constrained to a circular swept area of 1 m diameter or less. The rotors were designed using the traditional blade-element-momentum method. The performance of the blade was predicted and then the blades and hub were constructed and tested at the given windspeed for several loads. These tests provided data which allowed for a comparison between the predicted turbine design performance to its actual performance. Previous manufacturing techniques which formed each blade by removing material from a single rough block of material proved unsatisfactory since they were either too costly, required large amounts of machining time, or were too inaccurate due to hand construction. These problems led to the development a new technique using recyclable molds to quickly and accurately cast the blades using a durable and readily available urethane resin. The result was a process that minimized machining time, reduced cost and waste, and resulted in accurate and repeatable blade manufacture.

2 Project Goals and Constraints

◦ Design a 1 m diameter horizontal-axis wind turbine rotor to extract the largest amount of power from a 12 m/s incoming windspeed ◦ rotor diameter must be less than or equal to 1 m ◦ number of blades of the rotor must be less than or equal to four ◦ rotor hub must fit on the provided test-stand

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Gomes, M. (2010, June), A Practical Blade Manufacturing Technique For A Wind Turbine Design Project In A Renewable Energy Engineering Course Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--16973