Aerodynamic Design of Rotor of 1 Kw Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine

Wind has been used over a past decade for many purposes such as pumping water, grinding etc. with primitive designs such as windmills. The demand for a pollution-free and unlimited source of power extraction grew as time and technology progressed, as did a recognition of the finite nature of the world’s fossil fuel supplies, this led to the invention of wind turbines. In this work a small 1 kW wind turbine blade is being designed using BEM theory i.e. Blade Element Momentum theory assuming wake rotation, along with Prandtl’s correction factor for tip loss. An iterative algorithm is used here to ascertain rotor’s performance at each blade section at a specific tip speed ratio(TSR) and hence coefficient of power at that tip speed ratio. The process is repeated for all tip speed ratios corresponding to chosen no. of blades. Finally maximum power coefficient is calculated and then new modified blade design is obtained. This is being done by developing a computer program. For solid modelling of turbine rotor Solidworks software has been used.