Design and Analysis of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine with Optimized Mass of NACA0018 Blade Profile

Wind is one of the most reliable sources of renewable energy and is gaining more popularity in the regions where transmission and distribution of conventional electrical power is not practicable. In such areas this necessitates the installation of wind turbines to produce electrical power. The power generated by a wind turbine depends on its size. Greater the size of the turbine, more will be the power output. Hence, larger turbines are required to produce higher output power. As the size of the turbine increases, complexity and cost of installation also increase. To minimize this complexity, in this paper smaller wind turbine is considered for the analysis and the blade is designed to obtain the required electrical power. This paper proposes the novel blade design to produce electrical power for a small Vertical Axis Wind turbine (VAWT). Structural vibrations are one of the major drawbacks of VAWTs which can be reduced by choosing a suitable aspect ratio. Mass of the blade at the leading edge is increased to improve the rotational speed and compared to performance of the turbines with existing blade standards. The proposed blade is aerodynamically shaped and is designed by considering an airfoil with NACA0018 nomenclature. Aerodynamic nature of the blade enhances the rotational speed of the turbine rotor by extracting more kinetic energy from the wind. Mass of the existing blade and modified blade are compared and is analytically verified to validate the proposed design.