Aerodynamic design of horizontal axis wind turbine blades

Abstract

Designing horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) blades to achieve satisfactory levels of performance starts with the knowledge of aerodynamic forces acting on the blades. In this paper, a design method based on blade element momentum (BEM) theory is explained for HAWT blades. The method is used to optimize the chord and twist distributions of the blades. Applying this method a 1000W HAWT rotor is designed. A user-interface computer program is written on VISUALBASIC to estimate the aerodynamic performance of the existing HAWT blades and used for the performance analysis of the designed 1000W HAWT rotor. The program gives blade geometry parameters (chord and twist distributions), coefficients of performance and aerodynamic forces (trust and torque) for the following inputs; power required from the turbine, number of blades, design wind velocity and blade profile type (airfoil). The program shows the results with figures. It also gives the three dimensional views of the designed blade elements for visualization after exported to AutoCAD.