Volume 28: Closing Carbon Cycles – A Transformation Process Involving Technology, Economy, and Society: Part III

A Thin Cambered Bent Biomimetic Wind Turbine Blade Design by Adopting the 3D Wing Geometry of a Borneo Camphor Seed Yung-Jeh CHU, Heung-Fai LAM, Hua-Yi PENG

Abstract

This study proposed a new thin cambered bent biomimetic wind turbine design that adopted the 3D geometry of the wing of a Borneo camphor seed sample. The wings of the Borneo camphor seed are thin, cambered, and bent. The unique geometry and orientation of the wings cause the seed to autorotate during propagation, subsequently slowing down its falling speed. It was presumed that by mimicking the wings of a Borneo camphor seed, a high-performance biomimetic wind turbine design could be proposed since the wind turbine, and Borneo camphor seed shares a similar rotating mechanism. Computational fluid dynamics was adopted to predict the power coefficient, thrust coefficient, and torque of the proposed biomimetic wind turbine models. The results show that the highest power coefficient was 0.3861 for the biomimetic wind turbine model, which is 20.14% higher than that of a benchmark case when the fold axis and fold angles are equal to 30° and 30°, respectively. The findings of this study concluded that the proposed biomimetic wind turbine design is cost-effective and worthy of further investigation.

Keywords Wind turbine, biomimetics, CFD, Borneo camphor, 3D scanning, reverse engineering