Investigating the Design Parameters of Maple seed’s Aerodynamic Force by Taguchi Method to Apply to Wind Turbine Blades

Abstract

In the present study, the wing of the seed of the green maple was used as the imitated object, and the shape of the seed wing was analyzed. The setup of experiment and parameters design of the bionic wind turbine blade was then progressed by Taguchi method and the ANSYS Fluent simulation software was used to perform the numerical computations of the aerodynamic and flow characteristics of the wing of maple’s seed. Also, based on the experiment and simulation results, the Minitab17 software was used to analyze the data. The simulation results, by an inspection of the trend of the lift coefficient curves, indicated that the seed wing of the green maple has a larger range of angle of attack, $0 ^{\mathbf {0}}$ to $50^{\mathbf {0}}$, without a stall. The results for the optimal design parameters show a good agreement with the achievement for the best combination of the parameters are: A3 (the number of blade = 3), B3 (the swept area = ${0.24\,\,\mathrm{m}} ^{\mathbf {2}}$), C2 (the angle attack = $15^{\mathbf {0}}$) and D2 (the steady headwind = 5 m/s., which shows an aerodynamic advantage. In addition, the wind tunnel experiments of the wind turbine, with 3 bionic blades, $0.24\,\,\mathrm{m}^{\mathbf {2}}$ swept area, $15^{\mathbf {0}}$ angles of attack, and 5 m/s steady headwind conditions showed that the highest wind/electricity power transform efficiency can be reached up to 37%.