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

Abstract
The purpose of this project of wind turbine is to fully understand how does a
wind turbine function? from the stand to 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 that we created managed to light up
a L.E.D when wind is supplied to it.

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.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
- Objective
- Literature review
- Comparisons

5
6-8
9

2. Methodology

10-12

3. Results and Discussion

13-16

4. Conclusion and Recommendations

17

5. References

18

6. Appendices

19

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

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 busy trying to "make do" and that
are rushing backwards into the future -- in other words, every society on
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. (Herons
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.

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.

Comparisons between our design and

current design

Type of wind turbine

Current design

Our design

Generator

Electrical Generator

Bicycle Dynamo

The number of blades

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

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.

10

1st Meeting

2nd Meeting

3rd Meeting

4th Meeting

5th 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.
6th Meeting 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.
7th Meeting

2nd test run completed and the LED lighted up.

8th Meeting

Presentation slides and video is recorded for the operating wind turbine.
9th Meeting

11

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

12

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 fan,
Diameter of turbine,
Width of turbine blade,

Calculation
=

= 7.162m/s

7.162 = 0.4W/2
W = 35.8099rad/s

=
=143.2394m/s

14

m/s

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

=27.3297Watt

| |

m/s

15

m/s

16

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 its body to its structure of the blade.

17

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/

18

Appendices

19