Wind Turbine Effectiveness Project

[Max Pridgen]

Hello,
I am creating a wind turbine project that will be very simple to do, hopefully. I already have an old turbine that came from a camera in a airplane some years ago. I need to produce electricity with my turbine, obviously, and before I create my design, I want to ensure the effectiveness of my wind turbine is absolute. I believe I have a couple of design ideas, but before I set anything in stone, I figured I'd ask for advice.
My main inquiry has to do with how to produce the max amount of power I can. I believe the wind I will be using will come from a simple fan. I need to implement a design that will maximize the amount of power output with little wind input. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thank You

 

[electric jake]

Well my Advice for starters would be to use leverage to increase the torgue or the rpm based on your needs. Second if your using the wind turbine to make Alternating current (which i assume because mechanical motion is often used to make ac current) I suggest you use transformers so you can increase or decrease the voltage to desired levels based on whatever application you wish to use this for. Wish i could help more but i need more details on what your trying to accomplish.

 

[CWatters]

The electric fan will deliver a fixed amount of power to the air... So first off make sure as much of that airflow goes through your turbine as possible. The flow of air from the fan will diverge so perhaps make the turbine blades a bit larger diameter than the fan blades.

I would avoid using a gearbox unless you can somehow prove that this would improve the efficiency of the generator more than you would loose in the gearbox.

I'd make the pitch of the turbine blades and the load resistance on the generator adjustable. Drag is proportional to velocity squared so the maximum power output might not occur at maximum blade rpm. I'd set the blade angle and then vary the load resistance plotting load vs output power to find the peak. Then repeat that for various blade pitches. Plot blade pitch vs peak power to find the blade pitch at which peak power occurs.

 

[gleem]

Small commercial wind turbines that I am familiar with increase their output monotonically with air velocity roughly at v³ tending to fall off as the wind increases.

Turbine blade design is very important. Since the efficiency depends on the pitch and the optimal pitch depend on the wind speed you have significant problem. Small commercial turbines have blade whose pitch varies according to the distance from the center of rotation since wind speed on the edge of the blade depends on this distance.. Also the number of blades does not materially affect the efficiency although more blades make the turbine quieter.

The theoretical maximum efficiency of a wind turbine is suppose to be about 63%.remembering that the air would be dead still behind the blades at 100% efficiency

 

[A.T.]

The theoretical maximum efficiency of a wind turbine is suppose to be about 63%.

Slightly less: 59.3%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz's_law