Design of Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine Blade

Abstract

The objective of this study is to design a wind turbine. The design process includes the selection of the wind turbine type and the determination of the blade airfoil, pitch angle distribution along the radius, and chord length distribution along the radius. The pitch angle and chord length distributions are optimized based on conservation of angular momentum and theory of aerodynamic forces on an airfoil. Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory is first derived then used to conduct a parametric study that will determine if the optimized values of blade pitch and chord length create the most efficient blade geometry. This work includes a discussion of the most important parameters in wind turbine blade design to maximize efficiency. QBlade V0.8, an integration of different versatile software like xfoil, XLR5, 360 extrapolation using Montgomerie and Viterna theory, has been used for simulation.