I’ve been meaning to release more of my teaching material under copyleft style licenses for some time and have recently made the first release! The first bit to be released is a short wind turbine design guide which tells you how to calculate the flows around a wind turbine using some very simple theory. This is enough to get you a very simple blade design and there is an example calculation in a spreadsheet. The documents can be found on my University web pages.
I also have some Octave/MATLAB code for doing the calculation which since I think spreadsheets are evil. This shows the core of the basic method – but doesn’t go very much further.
Some answers to frequently asked questions:
Q: How do you get CL and CD data?
A: There are a variety of sources of data such as Abbot and Von Doenhoff’s book or the
Q: How do you pick the chord of the aerofoil?
A: There is an equation suggested in the document but this is one of those design problems where a bit a trial and error and help.
Q: Why is you Cl = 0.0844 i, the actual Cl curve is non-linear?
A: This is just a crude approximation to show how the method works, to do the job properly you need to add in some code to interpolate the real data.
Software Configuration Tips from an Idiot 