Abstract

The effect of blade number on small HorizontalAxis Wind Turbine (HAWT) has been studied experimentallyand numerically in this research. The turbine blade is made of aflat metal sheet and the tip was formed to shape a winglet. The5-blades turbine was tested inside a wind tunnel forperformance investigation at different wind speeds. Theexperiment was conducted under various wind speed, i.e. 3.5m/s, 3.9 m/s, 4.3 m/s, 4.6 m/s dan 5 m/s. Furthermore, threewind turbines geometry with different blade number (3, 4, and5 blades) were built for numerical study purpose by using AnsysFluent and the results were compared to the experimental one.The results show that the blade number does increase the windturbine torque and there is also more power generated from theturbine with more blade numbers since torque is related topressure. Moreover, the winglet helps the blade to retain theflow and increases the pressure on the blade surface. However,the experimental measurements obtained were smaller than thenumerical predictions about 50% on the average since moreunidentified losses existed and not accounted for the calculation.