top of page
Small-Scale Wind Turbine
Overview:
As part of a heat transfer laboratory course at Cornell University (MAE 4272), this project tasks a group of 3 students to design a blade to perform efficiently under a specific set of conditions for a small-scale wind turbine. Once designed, the blades were 3D printed and tested in a wind turbine under an experiment we designed.
Design Process
1. Independently select a bunch of airfoils from airfoiltools.com to analyze using MATLAB, while optimizing geometry using equations from lectures to change pitch and chord.
2. Consolidate all most efficient blades to compare, select the one with highest power coefficient.
3. Further optimize.
​Result: finalized NACA2414 airfoil, achieving superior performance by fine-tuning pitch, chord, and RPM.
Blade Design:
Results:
The small-scale wind turbine was tested under a variety of speeds. The plot depicts power extracted vs RPM for each speed to test against theoretical predictions.
Blade CAD
Report with MATLAB code attached:
bottom of page