In today’s developing world scenario power generation is one of the major factors which helps in the development of a country. There are many different ways by which power can be produced. These methods include thermal power stations, nuclear power stations etc. But these are all non-renewable sources of energy. Power can also be obtained from renewable resources. These include hydro power plants, solar power plants, solar thermal power plants and most importantly wind turbines. The wind farms in China produce more power output than all the nuclear power plants in the United States of America put together. Hence harnessing and exploiting the wind contained in the energy is important. Development of horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWTs) for small scale application is important. By modifying the blade design of the HAWTs, we can operate the wind turbine in low wind speeds. One more important factor in the modification is the selection of the aero foils that are to be used in the turbine blades.

The main aim of our project is to perform a theoretical analysis on a HAWT that we have designed for low wind speed conditions. The blade of the turbine is designed by considering the average wind speed in Tamil Nadu. By keeping this constant blade design we are changing the aero foils of the blade. The blade is modelled in Creo Parametric 3.0 which is then imported into an analysis platform, namely ANSYS 14.5 to perform a 3D flow analysis. After the wind turbine model is meshed, a steady state flow analysis in done in ANSYS using the fluent solver. The analysis is done on the wind turbine model for various airfoils. Using the results obtained we are matching the airfoils best suited for a location in Tamil Nadu such that the power output is constant, by retaining the same blade design.