Design Optimization and Analysis of Rotor Blade for Horizontal-Axis Wind Turbine Using Q-Blade Software

Abstract

Wind energy plays a tremendous role in energy power sector in terms of wind turbine. Engineers and scientists are trying to improve the wind turbine design in order to get the maximum power efficiency from the wind, which is one of the most cheap and common renewable resource in nature. The objective of this study was to design a horizontal wind turbine rotor blade for a site of known wind data in order  to extract the maximum power efficiency from the wind by using blade element theory analysis and Q-Blade simulation. Eight different aerofoils of different thicknesses from two NACA family 55xx and 00xx were considered for this study. The four different rotor blades were designed having length of 25 meter. Each blade consists of the combination of these NACA aerofoils which are oriented at different angles of attack and to simulate it at different Reynolds numbers. Comparative study was done to find the optimum blade design by considering the power output at two different rotational speeds and observe the effects of changing chord length and twist angle of final selected blade on these power output.