Abstract
A program to design a small capacity wind turbine blade is proposed in this study. The program is based on a matlab GUI environment and designed to perform blade design based on the blade element momentum theory. The program is different from other simulation tools available in a point that it can analyze the side-furling power regulation mechanism and also has an algorithm to find out optimal torque schedule above the rated wind speed region. The side-furling power regulation is used for small-capacity horizontal axis wind turbines because they cannot use active pitch control due to high cost which is commonly used for large-capacity wind turbine. Also, the torque schedule above the rated wind speed region should be different from that of the large capacity wind turbines because active pitching is not used. The program developed in this study was validated with the results with FAST which is the only program that can analyze the performance of side-furled wind turbines. For the validation a commercial 10 kW wind turbine data which is available in the literature was used. From the validation, it was found that the performance prediction from the proposed simple program is close to those from FAST. It was also found that the optimal torque scheduling from the proposed program was found to increase the turbine power substantially. Further experimental validation will be performed as a future work.
