Design and test of a 3D-printed horizontal axis wind turbine

Rapid prototyping is becoming more and more available to everyone through the apparition of fab labs and hackerspaces in universities and big cities. Its main advantages are the speed of fabrication and the ease to share designs with other people. People have great expectations of 3D printing in particular. The main goal of our master’s thesis was to prove that it can be used to build a whole working prototype such as a small wind turbine and to take advantage of this technology by designing parts differently. We achieved to build a 70cm rotor which produces up to 100W of power through a Maxon BLDC motor re-used as a generator. We developed a test bench with a variable load (through a Boost converter) to control the rotational speed of the wind turbine and study its aerodynamics. We found out that our design is quite efficient, with power coefficients up to 0,4. It was also very stable up to 900 rpm. Finally, we also theoretically developed tools to design a PMSG generator to be 3D printed, to replace the unadapted Maxon BLDC motor. However, we did not have the resources and the time to build it. The pre-design of this generator might be used in a future project about the 3D printing technology and the wind energy.