MINI WIND TURBINE FOR SMALL SCALE POWER GENERATION AND STORAGE (ARCHIMEDES WIND TURBINE MODEL)

The Archimedes wind turbine boasts an innovative blade design with the potential of harvesting energy from wind with much more efficiency. The blade design utilizes both lift and drag forces, and boasts several other advantages over conventional horizontal axis and vertical axis wind turbines, which implies higher power production efficiency and a possibility of being used in urban areas with attendant low wind speed regimes for small scale power generation, being more portable. However, there exists a dearth of experimental reports on the Archimedes wind turbine besides CFD simulations, to observe and study its real-life performance and power production potential. This paper is an experimental report on the design and wind test of the Archimedes wind turbine prototype, together with calculations made to gauge its tip speed ratio, power output and energy production potential. To show the viability of the prototype, the power produced is used to charge a HTC Desire cell phone, which proves that it can be relied upon to meet the title objective of small scale power storage with a power bank. Results are thereafter compared to other published work and show relatively good agreement. Minor deviations are attributed to the challenges encountered during the fabrication process.