The design of a double-fold blade wind turbine with flat-plate blade sections

作者：Chu, Yung-Jeh; Lam, Heung-Fai^*; Peng, Hua-Yi

来源：Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments, 2023, 59: 103382.

DOI：10.1016/j.seta.2023.103382

• Biomimetics
• Wind turbine
• Folding blade
• Computational fluid dynamics
• Flat -plate

This study presents a double-fold blade wind turbine design with flat plate blade sections that enables the usage of sheet-like materials and a cheaper fabrication method. The purpose of the current study is to analyze the performance of the blades, which are mainly controlled by four factors, namely the root fold-axis, tip fold-axis, root fold, and tip fold angles. The computational fluid dynamics results show that double-fold design configu-rations outperform single-fold configurations. For example, the highest peak power coefficient for the single-fold case (root fold-axis, root fold, and tip fold angles of 30 degrees, 15 degrees, and 0 degrees respectively) is 0.2018, while it is 0.2565 for the double-fold case (root fold-axis, tip fold-axis, root fold, and tip fold angles of 30 degrees, 30 degrees, 37.5 degrees and 30 degrees respectively). These findings gave new insights into the relationships between the fold axes and fold angles and the power coefficients of the proposed double-fold blade design.