Design of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

Conventional wind turbines in small units are costly and do not allow extensive use in our country for small-scale individual purpose. Also the highly efficient aerodynamically designed windmills require high wind velocity, which is not available in many states in India & Abroad. Considering all these an extremely simple design of a vertical axis wind rotor using two flat vertical vanes, swinging vanes has been fabricated and tested to obtain its performance. The torque and power coefficient have been obtained and presented in this Experimental thesis work. The results are highly encouraging and indicate the usefulness of the swingiDrag and torque coefficient of stationary S-shaped rotor have been investigated by measuring the pressure distribution on the blade surfaces for various rotor angles. The experiments have been carried out at a Reynolds number of 1.1 x 105 in a uniform flow jet produced by an open circuit wind tunnel. The measurements indicate that the drag force, and the torque, varies with rotor angle. The maximum net static torque occurs at 450 of rotor angle and it becomes negative in the range of 135 degree to 165degree of rotor angle.