DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF AN ECONOMICAL VERTICAL AXIS WIND TURBINE

Nowadays, ensuring access to energy is one of the serious challenges the world confronts. For those who live in poverty, a shortage of access to energy services desperately influences and undermines health, affects education and development. The problem of energy access for the poor countries has become even more intense because of the impacts of climate change, the global financial crisis and volatile energy prices. Then a use of another sources of energy such as wind power could be a good alternative in these countries. This paper represents a design of a vertical axis wind turbine that will produce an output power of 883 W for 9 m/s wind speed from a synchronous generator. The project involves the design and the sizing of all the components of this wind turbine. Oil barrels will be used as blades, Filippini was one of the first ones who developed a wind turbine architecture with half cylinders. Later, some modifications were introduced which leads to Thies rotor and C-rotor. A simple design was established to facilitate its implementation and reduce its cost. This wind turbine was designed to be used in developing countries. These facts had led to think about an uncomplicated conception and use accessible and cheap equipment which could be available all over the world. Afterwards, a scaled prototype was realized to make some, tests in order to examine its efficiency, some modifications were done to observe the feedback. The procedure of the design of the wind turbine was accomplished from the beginning to the end, no step has been skipped. Later, an estimation of cost was completed.The initial cost remains lower than the cost of a wind turbine in the market. Finally, this wind turbine could be constructed easily with accessible materials. An implementation of this machine in developing countries could help people in their lives. An economical model applied to an African country shows that using one turbine could save about 1400 per year.