Performance Analysis of Novel Blade Design of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

Abstract

Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) has advantages over Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) in unstable wind direction conditions, moderate, and intermittent wind sources, especially wind in an area of archipelago of Indonesia. To improve the VAWT performance, one of the influencing factors is blade design. The model of blade design will be affected by the output power. Therefore, the choice of blade design will be affected by the coefficient of power. The blade design was the airfoil of the type-H rotor of NACA 4212. Several empirical hypotheses obtained it through the practical experience subjected to use of the savonius blades. It will be shown in this study was to compare design a new type-H rotor VAWT blade using Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) software. The novel blade design was upper-curve H-blade of NACA 4212. It showed the result of the analytical analysis to be compared with the same upper-curve inverted blade, and with the upper-lower blade. The results of the performance comparison of numerical analysis, the upper-curve blade has a better power coefficient than the other types. Therefore, the upper-curve blade has the highest power output.