Analysis of resulting displacements in vertical wind turbine blades using SolidWorks

Abstract

Wind turbine blades are mechanisms that have the purpose of receiving wind currents to transmit the force that they receive into electricity. During its functioning, wind turbine blades experience torsion and compression stresses due to the force exerted on these, which can be of different way, depending of the design conditions and materials. For this reason, the present work focuses on the analysis of the forces applied to the blades in two different configurations of wind turbines, called Model A and Model B. A static study was applied to both models, with the aim of determining and comparing the deformations suffered by the structure and blades to each of the proposed models, under the same operating conditions and the same type of material. In addition, the effect of ambient pressure and average blade speeds of the proposed models is compared using a wind tunnel developed in SolidWorks software, to determine the minimum speeds required for their operation and application. The results show that Model A had a maximum deformation of 45,289 mm at the top of the blades. Under the same operating conditions, the Model B experiences a maximum deformation of 18,344 mm, which occurs at the side edges of the wind turbine blade. Therefore, the Model B has 40.50% less deformation and better aerodynamic utilization than the Model A, which make it as the most viable configuration.