Abstract
In this paper, two miniature horizontal-axis wind-turbine systems (MHAWTs) with and without gear transmission consisting of commercially available off-the-shelf components were designed for harvesting energy from ambient airflow to power wireless sensors. The basic performance of the MHAWTs was tested at various wind speeds () and resistive loads (10–500 Ω). The maximum output powers of the MHAWT with and without gear were 8.6 and 11 mW at the wind speed of , which suggested that both MHAWTs enabled powering low-power wireless sensors in natural airflow environment. To analyze the system efficiency and predict the optimal resistive load of the MHAWTs, an equivalent-circuit model was used. According to this model, the maximum system efficiency of the MHAWT system was predicted to be 14.8%. The actual maximum system efficiency of the MHAWTs with and without gears was tested as 8.4% and 7.5% at the wind speed of 8 and . In addition, the predicted optimal resistive loads of the MHAWTs with and without gear were 128 and 34 Ω, which correlated well with the tested results. The equivalent-circuit model is well suited to estimating and optimizing the performance of the MHAWTs.
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Published In
Journal of Energy Engineering
Volume 142 • Issue 1 • March 2016
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 11, 2013
Accepted: Mar 4, 2015
Published online: May 8, 2015
Discussion open until: Oct 8, 2015
Published in print: Mar 1, 2016
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