Design & Analysis of a Portable Wind Turbine for Power Recharging Device Application

Abstract

The increasing research and development towards harnessing renewable energy has led us to pick this design project on portable wind turbines. There has not been much research done on small-scaled wind turbines before. Our project is to design and perform analysis of a wind turbine that is portable and can operate at low wind speeds available at low altitudes. Design aspect of our project includes Blade design and whole Assembly design. Design phase is completed using two parallel approaches: QBlade Design Process and Theoretical Design Process. For Blade design we have used thin airfoil theory and Blade Element Momentum Theory to perform our calculations. E63 airfoil is chosen for blades as it is one of the thinnest airfoils available and is specifically designed to operate at low Reynold Numbers. Then whole turbine Assembly is designed in SolidWorks keeping portable concept in mind. Theoretical calculations are performed using MATLAB. Results obtained from both sources are compared side by side. Then a Dynamo of 20 Volts and 1.25 Amperes specs at 450 Rpm is selected for our wind turbine. To validate our design, we have performed 2D CFD Analysis of selected airfoil using ANSYS. CFD Analysis of whole turbine assembly is also performed using XFlow. Turbine is designed in such a way that it can be easily carried in a small backpack when dismantled