Design, CFD Analysis and Modelling of Archimedean-Spiral type Wind Turbine

This article presents the preliminary design of Archimedean spiral-type wind turbine, one of the emerging horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT), with the aid of calculations and observations of various geometric parameters by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. Through simulations conducted by varying the pitch and opening angle at wind velocity of 3.5 m/s, for a turbine of 150 mm diameter, the geometry of final model was selected to obtain maximum power coefficient. Pitch and opening angle selected for final model was 112.5 mm (1.5 times radius) and 60 degrees respectively. Selected model was scrutinized through CFD analysis in range of wind velocity varying from 3.5 m/s to 12 m/s to estimate the power output. At wind velocity of 8 m/s, 10 m/s and 12 m/s, maximum power output was 1.38 W, 2.72 W and 4.74 W respectively, all obtained at the tip speed ratio of 1.5. Maximum power coefficient of 0.25 was attained at this tip-speed ratio, irrespective of wind velocity.