Design, Development and Experimental Investigation of H-rotor Vertical Axis Wind Turbine under Low Wind Speeds

Suhaib Mohammed Shaikh, Raghuram L Naik

Abstract


H-rotor vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) are prominent wind energy converters for low wind speed applications due to their simple blade profile and efficient operation under turbulent wind conditions. This paper focuses on the design and development of H-rotor VAWT and its performance evaluation under low wind speeds. H-rotor VAWT is modelled in CATIA-v5 software with predetermined parameters such as blade profile, blade span, blade chord and turbine diameter for 25 W output power. Turbine blades are fabricated using low-cost and light-weight aluminium sheets and the H-rotor VAWT is developed using simple in-house fabrication techniques. A controlled wind environment with a wind speed range of 2.5 to 6.5 m/s is created using industrial fan blowers regulated by autotransformer. The performance of the prototype is evaluated in terms of tip speed ratio (?), output power (P), output torque (T) and Cp by varying the number of blades from two to five. The effect of solidity (quantified by variation in the number of blades) on the performance of the H-rotor VAWT is evaluated using different turbine characteristics. Reduced cut-in speed, high starting torque, increase in optimum ? and Cp are recorded for higher turbine solidity and an increase in the number of blades. However, this is attained at the expense of reduced peak power output for H-rotor models with the number of blades greater than three. The work presented in this paper would help researchers to design, develop, and perform experimental investigation and standardization of H-rotor VAWT for low wind speed operations.


Keywords


H-rotor; vertical axis wind turbine; design; development; performance analysis; low wind speed.

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DOI (PDF): https://doi.org/10.20508/ijrer.v13i1.12839.g8712

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