Dynamic performance enhancement of vertical wind turbine using composite blades reinforced by Zinc-Oxide nanoparticles

Abstract EN

The Performance of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) is highly dependent on its blades strength and stability.

This paper is mainly dealing with enhancing the blades' structure of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine which is suitable for countries that have a moderate wind speed.

The suggested improvement entails employing reinforced light composite blades using Zinc-Oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles (NPs) synthesized by the polymer-pyrolysis route.

To assess the performance of the proposed design, a multistage Savonius blades prototype is built to realize the essential ultrasonic and vibration tests.

Five different composite blades with different ZnO volume percentages are tested for assessing their values of the attenuation coefficient and the phase velocity and evaluating the composite material robustness.

A wind tunnel is also used to evaluate the prototype power coefficient.

Besides, the effect of the shift-angles between the different blades' stages on the turbine efficiency has been evaluated.

The theoretical analysis and experimental results of the natural frequencies ensured that the proposed model can avoid the resonance scenarios through working at considerably high rotating speeds.