A novel computational approach for design and performance investigation of small wind turbine blade with extended BEM theory

Blade is an important part in wind turbine system because of its vital role in extraction of energy from wind. In order to extract maximum possible energy, blade should be judiciously designed, for which it is supposed to be divided into several smaller sections (airfoil). SG6043 is selected for this work on account of its few merits over others existing airfoils. The article throws light on basis of blade element momentum theory and adopts its extended form to overcome its limitation in blade design and performance prediction while taking effect of wake into the account. This work investigates the performance of horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) in general, with emphasis on small HAWT over wide range of tip-speed ratio considering several effect on wind turbine. Results are validated with other experimental results published in various past literatures.