Design and analysis of vertical axis wind turbine

Vertical axis wind turbine  power  generation  equipment can  be  located  at  ground level,  which  makes  for  easy  maintenance.  Also, VAWT  are  Omni -directional,   meaning they  do  not  need  to  be  pointed  in  the  direction  of  the wind  to produce  power. Finally, there  is  potential  for  large  power  generation  with  VAWT   because   their  size  can  be Increased   greatly.  However,   there are also downfalls to the VAWT.  Firstly, boundary layer  affects from  the ground  influence  the  air stream  incident  on  the  VAWT,  which  in some  cases  leads  to  inconsistent  wind  patterns.  Secondly,  VAWT  are self-starting; currently,  an  outside  power  source  is  required  to  start  turbine rotation  until  a  certain rotational  speed is reached .The main objective of  our work is  to  design and build a self-starting  vertical  axis  wind turbine.  This  report  outlines  the  first  term  efforts  in  the  design  of  our  full-scale  VAWT ,which is to be built early in the second term does  not  have  large  lift  coefficients  at  low  Reynolds  numbers.  It  was  concluded  that  a profile  with  large  lift at  low  speeds  used along  with  passive  pitching  could  achieve  self-starting  status.  As  a  result,  three  blade  profiles  were  tested  and  compared  over  the testing in the  wind tunnel and  the blade profile that offers the best performance for self-starting.