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Innovative blade aerodynamic design pursued by master and undergraduate students is presented in the 14th meeting of the Wind Engineering Society

5 September 2024

The paper presented in WES2024
The paper presented in WES2024
Poster presentation in WES2024
Poster presentation in WES2024

An innovative blade aerodynamic design aiming to maximise the power produced by a small horizontal axis wind turbine was carried by a group of master and undergraduate students, and was presented in the international meeting of the UK wind engineering society (WES 2024) in Southampton this week.

The research and design activity was supported by the British Council (UKIERI) and the University STRIDE programme.

The novelty in the design is that it also looks at the overall drag the turbine endures. While for terrestrial applications, the drag is mainly important for structural consideration, for airborne applications as the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) it is also highly important for the aircraft performance.

Wind tunnel tests, computational fluid dynamics and reduced order modelling computations were carried out to show increases both in power and in the ratio of power to drag.

The paper was presented by the MSc student Kiran S Gadda and can also be found on https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/493296/

Further research by master and undergraduate students will follow this year as part of a British Council (UKIERI)-SPARC project that sees an international collaboration between students of the school and students of VIT Chennai, IIT Madras and with the in-kind support of the company Deutsche Wind Guard India. Further details on this project can be found on https://www.sems.qmul.ac.uk/news/6794/british-council-support-joint-wind-energy-research-project-with-vit-chennai/

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