Self sufficient buildings and design of wind turbines using Blade

element theory

Seshant Bhansali
Sai Siddarth
Sanya Shabir
Amreen Taj

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Aerospace Department

Abstract

The overall goal for the project is to create the most energy-efficient commercial
building possible. This paper will discuss the challenges that would be presented by this
project and particularly discuss how energy generation using wind turbines could
potentially meet the soaring power demands. We will also discuss the methods in which
we can reduce the power consumption in buildings. Lastly, we will look into the design
and optimization for the wind turbines in order to achieve our targets.

1. Introduction

The building is going to be 180m tall and the location was decided to be Kolkata. The
reason why Kolkata was chosen was purely to take advantage of the more or less constant
wind direction. The data taken from the last 30 years concluded that the city experiences
most of the winds coming from the S, S-E directions and it’s for the same reason that the
building would also be positioned facing the winds head-on. This would mean that
maximum energy could be derived from the incoming winds.

The idea of having wind turbines installed on buildings is not entirely a new concept.
Many such projects have been taken up in the past and The Bahrain World Trade Centre
is a good example of building-integrated wind turbines in a large-scale commercial
building application. The high-rise building integrates three HAWTs, each with a 29m
rotor diameter, into sky-bridges linking two 50-storey towers. Total cost for the wind
turbines were reported to be around 3.5% of the total project cost. The three wind
turbines generate between 1,100MWh to 1,300MWh annually, meeting about 11% to
15% of the building’s electricity demands.

The question arises if the above example the best way to harness the potential of wind
power?

Taking a glance at the equation of power we see

Using any wind-turbine having decided the cross-sectional area (A), the only
possible way to increase the power output is to have higher velocities of wind
flowing across the turbines. The way we are going to be able to achieve that is by
having the wind turbines installed inside a convergent divergent duct.

2. Relevant Background

A duct like the one shown below is basically a tube that is pinched in the middle making
a carefully balanced, asymmetric hourglass shape.

We will use this duct to accelerate the winds. We will make use of the Bernoulli principle.

The throat at the center is used to control the movement of air. A convergent section is a
nozzle that starts big and gets smaller- a decrease in the cross-sectional area. As a fluid
enter the smaller cross-section, it has to speed up due to the conservation of mass. To
maintain a constant amount of fluid moving through the restricted portion of the nozzle,
the fluid moving through the restricted portion of the nozzle, the fluid must move faster.

3. Calculations and results

The duct that would house the Horizontal Axis wind turbines would be constructed at a
height of 150m. It is important that the wind speeds be calculated at a height of 150m.
Most of the data available for windspeeds available on the internet are for a height of
10m above sea level.

In order to extrapolate the wind speeds at a height of 150 m. The most commonly used of
these simpler expressions is the Hellmann exponential law that correlates the wind speed
readings at two different heights and is expressed by

In which v is the speed at a height of h meters.

α is the friction co-efficient coefficient or the Hellman’s exponent. For a city the value is
0.4.

Wind speeds at a height of 150 m/s have minimum average speeds of 6-8m/s.
From basic continuity equation, �1�1 = �2�2 and ignoring the changes in density we
can calculate the Speed to the HAWT at the throat would then be around 36-48 m/s.

On taking the value of velocity as 43.4 m/s and using the calculations we get as much as
305.812 KWh of power. If we use two such ducted fans we get twice the power output.
Power consumed by the building Power developed by the turbines
8262000 Kwh Annually 4834425.6 Kwh Annually
We can see that the ducted wind turbines produce 41.4% of the power.

In order to achieve this target, we must design the wind turbines appropriately.

4. Using blade element theory to design our wind turbine blades.

There are 2 methods to achieve the design. The first is to use a momentum balance on a
rotating annular stream tube passing through a turbine. The second is to examine the
forces generated by the aerofoil lift and drag coefficients at various sections along the
blade. These two methods then give a series of equations that can be solved iteratively.

MOMENTUM THEORY

4.1 Axial force

Consider the stream tube around a wind turbine shown in Figure 1.

Four stations are shown in the diagram 1, some way upstream of the turbine, 2 just before
the blades, 3 just after the blades and 4 some way downstream of the blades. Between 2
and 3 energy is extracted from the wind and there is a change in pressure as a result.

Assume p1 = p4 and that V2 = V3.

We can also assume that between 1 and 2 and between 3 and 4 the flow is frictionless so
we can apply Bernoulli’s equation.

After some algebra:

4.2 Rotating Annular stream tube
4.4 Blade element theory

The theory relies on two assumptions.

i) There are no aerodynamic interaction between different blade elements,

ii) The forces on the blade elements are solely determined by the lift and drag
coefficients.
4.5 Relative flow

Lift and drag coefficient data are available for a variety of aerofoils from wind tunnel
data. Since most wind tunnel testing is done with the aerofoil stationary we need to relate
the flow over the moving aerosol to that of the stationary test. To do this we use the
relative velocity over the aerofoil. More details on the aerodynamics of wind turbines and
aerofoil selection can be found in Hansen and Butterfield (1993). In practice the flow is
turned slightly as it passes over the aerofoil so in order to obtain a more accurate estimate
of aerofoil performance an average of inlet and exit flow conditions is used to estimate
performance. The flow around the blades starts at station 2 in Figures 2 and 1 and ends at
station 3. At inlet to the blade the flow is not rotating, at exit from the blade row the flow
rotates at rotational speed ω. That is over the blade row wake rotation has been
introduced. The average rotational flow over the blade due to wake rotation is therefore
ω/2. The blade is rotating with speed Ω. The average tangential velocity that the blade
experiences is therefore Ωr + 1 2 ωr. This is shown in Figure 5
4.6 Blade elements

4.7 Calculating power

To calculate the total power we must integrate the Power produced by each section from
the blade to the hub.

5. Procedure/Algorithm to calculate power using Excel

6. Results and graphs

We use the powerful tool in Excel to calculate the power produced by the turbine blades.
Here the two M Vs R graphs show the difference in the how the power produced by the
blades can simply increase by increasing the chord size.
The tables below show the power produced by the simply changing the chord length at
various sections.
We see that we are very close , or rather are able to get more power than what we had
expected.

6.1

5. Conclusions

It is common to include a conclusions section to summarize the content of your paper,

discuss future directions, and state any open problems or conjectures. A conjecture is
something the authors believe to be true, but cannot prove. For example, one of the most
famous, and most difficult, problems in graph theory is the following.

Conjecture 1. (Total Coloring Conjecture) The edges and vertices of a graph can be
colored with at most +2 colors, where  is the maximum degree of any vertex in the
graph.

Valuable additional information on technical writing for computer scientists can be found
in [3, 4]. Zobel’s book contains information on format, style, grammar, punctuation, and
other material of a fundamental nature, while Knuth’s book is aimed at the person aiming
to write serious mathematics or computer science papers.

Besides the sources mentioned above, I am happy to provide you with papers to read that
may prove useful in aiding your understanding of what a paper should look like. I can
also provide a LaTex template for a paper. See my web site for an example of a term
paper and the LaTex file for that paper.

References
1. M. Garey and D. Johnson, Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of
NP-Completeness, W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1979

2. L. Lamport, LaTex 2e: A Document Preparation System, Addison-Wesley, Reading,

Mass., 1994

3. K. Appel and W. Haken, “Every Planar Map is 4-colorable,” Bull. Amer. Math. Soc.,
vol. 82 (1976), pp. 711-712

4. D. Knuth, Mathematical Writing, Mathematical Association of America, 1989

5. J. Zobel, Writing for Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1997

Appendix

Sometimes you may require one or more appendices, where data, information, or details
can be collected that would otherwise make the body of the paper hard to read. “Raw
data” from experiments, source code, and so on may be placed in an appendix.