Fabricating Varying Geometric Wind Turbine Airfoils to Analyze Flutter

Wind turbines are efficient and environmentally friendly, but they need to be constantly studied to improve safety and performance. Flutter is a particularly important concern for wind turbines, as it can cause fatigue and subsequent failure in turbine blades. Flutter is the vibration of the blade caused by external loads and high angular velocities. This report focuses on the design and testing of a system capable of simulating a small scale wind turbine at 5000 rpm. The blades were made of PLA and were rotated with a motor. The angle of sweep of the blade tips were varied and the rotations per minute (rpm) was measured. Sweep angles of 0 degrees, 5 degrees, 10 degrees, and 20 degrees were tested. The rpm at which flutter occurs is determined by the amplitude output measured by strain gauges mounted on the blades. This report aims to determine if there is a correlation between the angle of sweep and the rpm at which the blades flutter. From the data collected in a similar experiment, evidence suggests a slight trend of a decreasing rpm “speed limit” at which flutter occurs for higher degree sweeps (20 degrees), but overall there was not a strong correlation between sweep angle and the rpm at which flutter was evident