۱- Introduction

۲- Bio-inspired wind turbine blade design

۳- Manufacturing design

۴- Wind turbine performance

۵- Conclusions

References

Abstract

A wind turbine blade design inspired by a tree seed called Triplaris Americana is presented. The blade was designed by means of an analysis of the seed’s curvature and airfoil along its wingspan; the result is as a non-conventional horizontal axis wind turbine composed of three blades. A computational fluid dynamic simulation was performed in order to estimate the operational loads. The blade’s structure was designed by means of composite structural design, resulting in six zones with different laminates of carbon fiber. The balance of the aerodynamic and inertial loads was achieved in order to guarantee a minimum change in blade’s geometry to prevent a performance reduction. Finally, a manufacturing simulation by means of vacuum assisted resin infusion was performed. Four injections strategies were proposed with three of them considered successful based on a complete mold filling and the time limit imposed by the polymerization time of the resin.

Introduction

Renewable energy has gained so much interest in the past few years, due to the necessity of generating eco-friendly electric energy making use of renewable resources like wind, solar, thermal and so on. Situations such as global warming and pollution have caused the improvement of wind energy harvested in order to generate electricity, avoiding the emission of polluting gases. Up to date, the wind energy market is more dominant than the solar technology market in projects where big capacities are needed (dozens or hundreds of megawatts) [1], and despite of all the challenges to implement wind energy technology, the cost associated to all the stages (design, manufacture and operation) continues to reduce while a more standardized industry is growing up [2]. Although most of the work is concentrated in large scale wind turbines, in the last few years small and low scale wind speed turbines studies have been increased bit by bit with the purpose of such devices can be reachable to small industries and countries that can not afford wind farms with large ones or even do not have the appropriate wind conditions to operate them.