Design, implementation, and performance analysis of miniature wind turbine

Significant progress has been made in the last few decades in developing the technology of large-scale wind turbines to generate power from the wind flow. However, only few numerical and experimental studies have been carried out to investigate the performance and operating conditions of their small scale counterparts. These latter present an attractive energy harvesting technique to power small electronic devices in isolated or abandoned areas and wireless sensors placed in confined and inaccessible spaces. In this study, we propose the full design, implementation, and experimental verification of a portable horizontal axis wind turbine for low power applications. The wind turbine has three blades and a rotor with a diameter of 68 cm. It comprises some commercially available but carefully-selected off-the-shelf components to ease the power generation. The nacelle is designed and 3D printed, and the shaft connecting the rotor to the gear system is manufactured with the goal to reduce the frictional losses and enhance the power generation. The experimental study includes testing and calibrating several sensors to verify the reliability of the acquired data. At this phase, the main objective is to develop a reliable in-house experimental setup and verify the consistency of the obtained measurements in terms of the rotational speed, generated voltage and current and electrical power with respect to previously-published studies. The wind tunnel experiments showed the capability of the developed wind turbine to produce 1.3 W at air speed of 7 m/s.