Implementation of Taguchi Method for Designing a Robust Wind Energy System – A Wind Turbine

Abstract

The current paper demonstrates the design parameters and tolerances for a horizontal axis wind turbine which is used to extract the energy from the wind. Here in the present work, one of the DOE (design of experiment) methods namely Taguchi method, a traditional approach for designing a robust wind turbine is adopted. For optimization purpose, the evaluation and estimation of various problems i.e; constrained as well as unconstrained have been done using Taguchi method. For the derivation of design parameters like lift coefficient (CL), drag coefficient (CD) and power coefficient (CP), the L-9 Orthogonal array (OA) comprising of 4 parameters each with three levels (NACA aerofoil type, Mach number, Reynolds number and angle of attack) is considered. Open source Q-Blade designing software is used for determining the power, lift and drag coefficients of the wind turbine. The combination of GRA and orthogonal arrays are used for attaining the optimized parameters. In this paper an investigation has been carried out on the specific NACA aerofoils 4412, 4712, and 4421. Among all the aerofoils NACA 4712 has shown impressive results in terms of a maximum lift coefficient of 0.9491and minimum drag coefficient of 0.02601. Also from signal-to-noise plots it can be inferred that the most influenced parameter for CL and CD is Mach number and Aerofoil for CP .