Wind turbine blades and bearing calculation help

You could just use Newton's method to calculate the lift generated by the profile of your blades. This method just integrates the pressure coefficient over the surface of the profile. That will give you the driving force and therefore the speed that they will rotate at. I would then compare this to CFD simulations. Come to think of it, this would make quite a nice Uni project. Working backwards from a required speed might be tricky though.

As a way of cheating, you could look up to see if a TSR (tip speed ratio) exists for your blade profile and that will give you the speed at which it will rotate at a particular wind speed. The other method would be impressive from a uni perspective though.

 

I wouldn't worry too much about friction at the bearings. That will be negligible compared with the torque needed to accelerate the turbne and generator reasonably quickly from rest up to a practical RPM.

To give you an idea how low bearing friction is, you can easily turn the low speed rotor of a big jet engine (mass of rotor = about 2000lb) by hand with one finger. In fact for some test procedures you need to keep the rotor turning slowly (at 1 or 2 RPM) and one way to do that is to use an ordinary office fan to blow air onto the engine fan blades.

 

My apologies, I just asumed that's what you were after since the friction on the bearing would usuually not even be considered. Pretty much what Zero said.

 

I would like to know how to calculate bearing load