The Airfoil Design for Small-Scale Wind Turbines in Maximizing Renewable Wind Energy

As one alternative of renewable energy sources, wind turbine (WT) has risen to dominate the energy source with its large-scale wind turbine. Of late however, there are growing appeals for small-scale wind turbine (SSWT) that operates in urban areas and territories with minimal wind speed as a complement to its large counterparts. However, the SSWT comes with challenging problems of low wind speed that not only gives low lift force, \({F}_{L}\) but also low Reynold’s number, \(Re\) that leads to drag controlled flow. Both are the primary reasons for the SSWT to have low glide ratio, \(L/D\) , power coefficient and power. Airfoil design plays a crucial role in accomplishing the maximum possible \(L/D\) over a longer range of angle of attacks (AOAs) that gives the highest achievable power coefficient and power. In current situation, with the increasing trend of WT usage in regions with low wind speed, the SSWT can still benefit from new airfoil designs. As such in this study, a set of three airfoils specifically for low \(Re\) are obtained through geometric adjustments of a high-performance airfoil, WT180 that is suitable for large-scale wind turbine. At low \(Re\) of 100,000, the newly adjusted airfoils were found to have \(L/D\) of up to 46 which is higher by 44% compared with the original WT180 and 4% compared with the SG6043 airfoil, the well-known airfoil designed for WT having low wind speed condition.