Wind Turbine Project Report

WIND TURBINE PROJECT REPORT BMM 2543 FLUIDS MECHANICS 2

Lecturer Dr. AHMED NURYE OUMER

NAME Phoa Chong Wei On Eng Heng Ng Yee Shian

MATRIC NO. MC12050 MC12051 MC12054

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Abstract The purpose of this project of wind turbine is to fully understand how does a wind turbine function? from the standto the structure of the blades. We created a mini wind turbine prototype made up from scrap materials like pipe joints, manila card, and a dynamo to produce electricity to do so. Through this project, we learnt how a lot of things related to the wind turbine. First of all, we learnt that the size of the blades must be proportional to the size of the dynamo we used. Secondly, the angle of the blade affects greatly on the results. Last but not least, we realised that there must not be obstacles behind the blades, the larger the area of the obstacle the slower the blades speed. In conclusion, the wind turbine thatwe created managed to light up a L.E.D when wind is supplied to it.

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Acknowledgement We have taken efforts in this project. However, it would not have been possible without the kind support and help of many individuals and organizations. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all of them. We are highly indebted to Dr. Ahmed Nurye Oumer, our Fluids Mechanics 2 lecturer for his guidance and constant supervision as well as for providing necessary information regarding the project & also for his support in completing the project. We personally would like to acknowledge with a deep sense of reverence towards our group members for their kind co-operation and encouragement which help me in completion of this project. Next, we would like to express our special gratitude and thanks to the other groups for sharing their ideas and assist us in doing our project. At last but not least, gratitude goes to all of my friends who directly or indirectly helped us to complete this project. Any omission in this brief acknowledgement does not mean lack of gratitude.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction - Objective - Literature review - Comparisons

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2. Methodology

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3. Results and Discussion

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4. Conclusion and Recommendations

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5. References

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6. Appendices

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Introduction

Objectives

Objective serves as a purpose of doing something and one of the objectives of doing this project is to understand the theory behind the process of the wind turbine in generating electricity which involves the wind speed, power output, area of the blade and the angle of blade and finally the efficiency of the turbine. The second objective would be to understand on how different types of design of the blade will produce different output power which will influence the efficiency of the wind turbine. By doing this project, we learn to create more understanding about the procedure of doing a project and indirectly will help toward the final year project. Through this project we learn how to work in a team, communicate with each other, sharing responsibility and cooperating in groups in order to complete the project with a given dateline. Last but not least we learn how to utilise scrap materials like unwanted pipe joints and recycled materials and thus indirectly educating us to be more environmental friendly

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Literature Review Wind Turbine For human development to continue, we will ultimately need to find sources of renewable or virtually inexhaustible energy. It's difficult to imagine this, but even if we find several hundred or even thousand years of coal and natural gas supplies, what will humans do for the next 250,000 years or so after they are depleted? Even the most apparently "inexhaustible" sources like fusion involve the generation of large amounts of waste heat -- enough to place damaging stress on even a robust ecosystem like Earth's, at least for the organisms that depend upon stability of the system to survive. We are engaged in a sort of world-wide biological experiment, with our descendent as the subjects. Our present habits of energy use are shaping an entirely different earth than the one with which we are familiar. When these changes begin to be expressed, there will be no one to preserve the familiar and there's no guarantee that things will turn out the best for our particular species. Some have looked ahead and seen this. But they usually don't get much support from societies that are too to every "makesociety do" and are rushing backwards into the future -- inbusy othertrying words, onthat earth. Windmills were used in Persia (present-day Iran) as early as 200 B.C. (Early through History, 1875, pt. 1) The wind wheel of Heron of Alexandria marks one of the first known instances of wind powering a machine in history . (Heron’s Windmill, 1961, p 145-151) However, the first known practical windmills were built in Sistan, an Eastern province of Iran, from the 7th century. These "Panemone" were vertical axle windmills, which had long vertical drive shafts with rectangular blades. (Islamic Technology, An Illustrated History, 1986, p. 54) Made of six to twelve sails covered in reed matting or cloth material, these windmills were used to grind grain or draw up water, and were used in the gristmilling and sugarcane industries. (Mechanical Engineering in the Medieval Near East, 1991, p. 64-69) Windmills first appeared in Europe during the middle ages. The first historical records of their use in England date to the 11th or 12th centuries and there are reports of German crusaders taking their windmill-making skills to Syria around 1190. (Wind Energy in the 21st centuries Economics, Policy, Technology and the Changing Electricity Industry, 2002) By the 14th century, Dutch windmills were in use to drain areas of the Rhine delta. The first electricity-generating wind turbine was a battery charging machine installed in July 1887 by Scottish academic James Blyth to light his holiday home in Marykirk, Scotland. Some months later American inventor Charles F 6

Brush built the first automatically operated wind turbine for electricity production in Cleveland, Ohio. Although Blyth's turbine was considered uneconomical in the United Kingdom electricity generation by wind turbines was more cost effective in countries with widely scattered populations. (Wind Energy in the 21st centuries Economics, Policy, Technology and the Changing Electricity Industry, 2002)

The first automatically operated wind turbine, built in Cleveland in 1887 by Charles F. Brush. It was 60 feet (18 m) tall, weighed 4 tons (3.6 metric tonnes) and powered a 12 kW generator.(A Wind Energy Pioneer, 2008, p. 12-28) In Denmark by 1900, there were about 2500 windmills for mechanical loads such as pumps and mills, producing an estimated combined peak power of about 30 MW. The largest machines were on 24-meter (79 ft) towers with fourbladed 23-meter (75 ft) diameter rotors. By 1908 there were 72 wind-driven electric generators operating in the US from 5 kW to 25 kW. Around the time of World War I, American windmill makers were producing 100,000 farm windmills each year, mostly for water-pumping. By the 1930s, wind generators for electricity were common on farms, mostly in the United States where distribution systems had not yet been installed. In this period, high-tensile steel was cheap, and the generators were placed atop prefabricated open steel lattice towers. A forerunner of modern horizontal-axis wind generators was in service at Yalta, USSR in 1931. This was a 100 kW generator on a 30-meter (98 ft) tower, connected to the local 6.3 kV distribution system. It was reported to have an annual capacity factor (Electrical Power, Challenges and Choices, 1986) of 32 per cent, not much different from current wind machines .[10] In the fall of 1941, the first megawatt-class wind turbine was synchronized to a utility grid in Vermont. The Smith-Putnam wind turbine only ran for 1,100 hours before suffering a critical failure. The unit was not repaired because of shortage of materials during the war.

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The first utility grid-connected wind turbine to operate in the UK was built by John Brown & Company in 1951 in the Orkney Islands.( Orkney Sustainable Energy, 2010) Despite these diverse developments, developments in fossil fuel systems almost entirely eliminated any wind turbine systems larger than supermicro size. In the early 1970s, however, anti-nuclear protests in Denmark spurred artisan mechanics to develop microturbines of 22 kW. The organizing of owners into associations and co-operatives led to the lobbying of the government and utilities, which incentivized larger turbines throughout the 1980s and afterwards. Local activists in Germany, nascent turbine manufacturers in Spain, and large investors in the U.S. in the early 1990s then lobbied for policies which stimulated the industry in those countries. Later companies formed in India and China. As of 2012, Danish company Vestas is the world's biggest wind-turbine manufacturer. The popularity of using the energy in the wind has always fluctuated with the price of fossil fuels. When fuel prices fell after World War II, interest in wind turbines waned. But when the price of oil skyrocketed in the 1970s, so did worldwide interest in wind turbine generators. The wind turbine technology R&D that followed the oil embargoes of the 1970s refined old ideas and introduced new ways of converting wind energy into useful power. Many of these approaches have been demonstrated in "wind farms" or wind power plants — groups of turbines that feed electricity into the utility grid — in the United States and Europe. Today, the lessons learned from more than a decade of operating wind power plants, along with continuing R&D, have made wind-generated electricity very close in cost to the power from conventional utility generation in some locations. Wind energy is the world's fastest-growing energy source and will power industry, businesses and homes with clean, renewable electricity for many years to come.

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Comparisons between our design and current design

Type of wind turbine

Current design

Our design

Generator

Electrical Generator

Bicycle Dynamo

The number of blades

3

4

The shape of blades

Aerofoil Shape

Rectangle

The materials of blades

Fiberglass-reinforced epoxy

Card board paper

Diameter

80-100m

0.4m

Cost

RM3 million RM4 million

RM15

Wind Source

Natural Wind

Table Fan

Power generated

2MW

2W

–

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Methodology The product was design to have four turbine blades for capturing the air flow and convert it into electrical energy by using a dynamo. Our aim is to build a wind turbine where the cost is as low as possible. We planned to use 1 inch diameter PVC pipe as the main frame of the wind turbine, as we can find it easily near the dump site in UMP. The blades was to be fixed on the hub of the wind turbine which will gives a blade angle of 30o measured from the vertical axis from side view of the turbine blade. As the air flow through the turbine blades, it creates a torque that rotates the hub, which is connected to the dynamo. The electrical energy is then transferred to a LED attached at the back of the wind turbine via cables. The blades were initially designed to be triangular, where the outer radius will have a bigger area coverage to capture more wind to produce more torque. Then, we prepared alternative design of the blades in case the first one did not work out. The second design of the turbine blades was based on a traditional 4-blade-wind turbine.

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1st Meeting

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2nd Meeting

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3rd Meeting

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4th Meeting

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5th Meeting

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6th Meeting

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7th Meeting

Drafting of the project. Manage to obtain the first draft of turbine blades.

2nd turbine blade design is produced. Finalize main frame design.

Spread out to find and gather materials needed. Purchased the materials that we lack off.

Main frame unit fully assembled. Attached dynamo on to the main frame.

Blades for both designs are fully made. Assembled the 1st designed blade on to the hub.

Mounted the assembled turbine blades and hubs on to the dynamo for the 1st test run. Carried out the 1st test run. LED failed to light up.

Changed the turbine blades to the 2nd designed blades for 2nd run. Success fully mounted the turbine blades but test run cancelled due to weather constrains.

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2nd test run completed and the LED lighted up.

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Presentation slides and video is recorded for the operating wind turbine.

8th Meeting

9th Meeting

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Date Meeting

05/12

06/12

07/12

08/12

09/12

10/12

11/12

12/12

13/12

14/12

15/12

1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th

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Results and Discussion From our design, the materials used and the shape of the blade are actually different from the common blades. The materials used are due to the cost and the processes involved to produce the same blades used in industrial wind turbines are tedious. The shape of our design blade are rectangle in shape, this is due the convenience of designing the blade and cut it into shapes rather than using the aerofoil shaped blade because we do not have the apparatus to do so.

The triangle velocity 13

Assumption

             

         Measurement

  Diameter of turbine,  Width of turbine blade,  Diameter of fan,

Calculation

 = 7.162m/s    =   

 = =  7.162 = 0.4W/2 W = 35.8099rad/s

     =

 

=143.2394m/s

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             m/s     

 

= (1.184)(0.9)(7.162 x 197.2471) =1505.3558Watt

     )  = (   =27.3297Watt

       

     ||  ||  ||  √     m/s

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                           m/s

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Conclusions All of the objectives of this wind turbine project are achieved through the cooperation of all members. By using the concept of theory behind the process of the wind turbine in generating electricity which involves the wind speed, power output, area of the blade and the angle of the blades as well as the efficiency of the turbine, we successfully build a homemade mini wind turbine prototype by using scrap and unwanted materials like pipe joints. From the discussion, we learned a lot of things, first being a high efficiency wind turbine must have large and thin blades. The function large blades are to catch the wind hence minimize the amount of energy loss to the surrounding while the thin turbine can increases the blade stiffness to against the strong wind sources. The larger and the thinner blades will increase the rotational speed hence generate more electricity from the electrical generator. The inclined angle of the blades must be optimum to prevent and minimize the loss of energy. In conclusion, we learnt on how does a wind turbine functions. From it’s body to it’s structure of the blade.

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References Kid Wind Project 2013. Retrieved from http://learn.kidwind.org/files/manuals/ADVANCED_BLADE_DESIGN_MANUAL. pdf Wind Turbine (updated on 11th December 2013) Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine

Darrell M. Dodge (2006) Illustrated History of Wind Power Development. Retrieved from http://www.telosnet.com/wind/

APA STYLE REFERENCE PAGE (not stated) Retrieved from http://ww2.usj.edu/PDF/CAE/apareferencepage_6th_ed.pdf

Science Tube Today (2012) Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS74oAmjpxU

https://www.google.com.my/

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Appendices

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