International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—The effect of blade number on small Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) has been studied experimentally and numerically in this research. The turbine blade is made of a flat metal sheet and the tip was formed to shape a winglet. The 5-blades turbine was tested inside a wind tunnel for performance investigation at different wind speeds. The experiment was conducted under various wind speed, i.e. 3.5 m/s, 3.9 m/s, 4.3 m/s, 4.6 m/s dan 5 m/s. Furthermore, three wind turbines geometry with different blade number (3, 4, and 5 blades) were built for numerical study purpose by using Ansys Fluent and the results were compared to the experimental one. The results show that the blade number does increase the wind turbine torque and there is also more power generated from the turbine with more blade numbers since torque is related to pressure. Moreover, the winglet helps the blade to retain the flow and increases the pressure on the blade surface. However, the experimental measurements obtained were smaller than the numerical predictions about 50% on the average since more unidentified losses existed and not accounted for the calculation.

Index Terms—Computational fluid dynamics, blades number, horizontal axis wind turbine, wind energy, performance.

Andi F. Sudarma and Subekti Subekti are with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Universitas Mercu Buana, Jakarta, 11650, Indonesia (e-mail: andi.firdaus@mercubuana.ac.id, subekti@mercubuana.ac.id).
Muhammad Kholil and Indra Almahdy are with the Department of Industrial Engineering, Universitas Mercu Buana, Jakarta, 11650, Indonesia (e-mail: m.kholil@mercubuana.ac.id, indraal@mercubuana.ac.id).

[PDF]

Cite: Andi F. Sudarma, Muhammad Kholil, Subekti Subekti, and Indra Almahdy, "The Effect of Blade Number on Small Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) Performance: An Experimental and Numerical Study," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 11, no. 12, pp. 555-560, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).