Design and analysis of small-scale horizontal axis wind turbine using PVC material

The project aims to develop a low-cost horizontal axis wind turbine that will reduce energy costs and reduce reliance on non-renewable resources for power generation. There are many types of commercially available wind turbine designs are present currently but they require sophisticated manufacturing using composite materials that makes it very complex hence they are very costly. Our aim is to suggest a suitable alternate to this that can cater the needs of small-scale wind turbine design having a simple and cost-effective design. For this, PVC was chosen as a material because it is readily available, inexpensive, and lightweight, allowing it to deliver more power. Our main focus was to study the feasibility of this design and have a comparison with the current industrial 3D blade designs. CFD analysis on the proposed design was conducted including parametric studies on PVC, as well as structural and modal analysis for blades with appropriate power coefficients and it is compared with the industrial 3D wind turbine blades. The analysis is carried out in such a way that the pressure distribution obtained from the CFD analysis is imported into structural analysis and used as a load boundary condition. The total deformation and equivalent stress on the blade are calculated for a design which was giving the highest efficiency from the parametric studies.