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Design of blades for household small wind turbines

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Abstract

Many countries have installed horizontal large-scale wind turbine (HLSWT) farms for green generation of electricity but unknowing the long-term consequences of this technology. Recent publications have demonstrated that HLSWT can contribute to weather changes and surface warming increasing precipitation rates. Horizontal household small wind turbines (HHSWTs) have been proposed as a sustainable option to reduce the environmental impact in the generation of electricity by wind energy conversion. However, some issues related to the sustainability and high initial costs of blades materials and processing techniques should be overcome to become HHSWT accessible for the population. In this work, an automated computer-aided design process is supplied for the creation of aerodynamically optimized, monolithic, low-cost and sustainable blades for HHSWT. The procedure presented takes into consideration the environmental conditions of the placement area of the windmill, and it is applicable to obtain blades of any length and with any targeted output power.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code availability

All developed computational codes are included in Appendix.

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Funding

This work was supported by the “Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata” [15/G575] and the “Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica” [PICT-2017–2458].

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Grupo de Materiales Compuestos Termoplásticos (CoMP) - Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencia Y Tecnología de Materiales (INTEMA), Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (UNMdP) – Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Av. Colón 10890, (7600), Mar del Plata, Argentina

    C. Miranda & L. N. Ludueña

  2. División Metalurgia - Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencia Y Tecnología de Materiales (INTEMA), Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (UNMdP) – Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Av. Colón 10890, (7600), Mar del Plata, Argentina

    A. D. Basso

  3. Grupo de Compuestos Estructurales Termorrígidos (CET) - Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencia Y Tecnología de Materiales (INTEMA), Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (UNMdP) – Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Av. Colón 10890, (7600), Mar del Plata, Argentina

    G. M. Francucci

Authors
  1. C. Miranda
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  2. A. D. Basso
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  4. L. N. Ludueña
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection and analysis were performed by Eng. Catalina Miranda and LL. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Eng. CM, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to L. N. Ludueña.

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Appendices

Appendix

A. 1. Octave code for airfoil selection

figure a
figure b

A. 2. Aerodynamic zone

A.2.1 OCTAVE code for the aerodynamic optimization

figure c

A.2.2 OCTAVE Code for the offset procedure

figure d
figure e

A.2.3 AOOB Macro

figure f

A.3. Transition zone

A.3.1 Sigmoidal fittings

A.3.1.1 Percentage vs. profile number

$$ y = 119.82 + \frac{{\left( { - 11.99 - 119.82} \right)}}{{1 + e^{{\frac{{\left( {x - 11.68} \right)}}{4.83}}} }} $$

See Fig. 

Fig. 16
figure 16

Percentage as a function of the profile number

Full size image

16.

A.3.1.2 Chord vs. length

$$ y = 310.48 + \frac{{\left( {168.74 - 310.48} \right)}}{{1 + e^{{\frac{{\left( {x - 11.68} \right)}}{4.83}}} }} $$

See Fig. 

Fig. 17
figure 17

Chord length as a function of the blade length

Full size image

17.

A.3.2 Coefficients

See Table

Table 3 Coefficients of the polynomial fit
Full size table

3.

A.3.3 OCTAVE code

figure g
figure h
figure i
figure j

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Miranda, C., Basso, A.D., Francucci, G.M. et al. Design of blades for household small wind turbines. Int J Energy Environ Eng 13, 621–642 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40095-021-00464-3

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