The design of a double-fold blade wind turbine with flat-plate blade sections

This study presents a double-fold blade wind turbine design with flat plate blade sections that enables the usage of sheet-like materials and a cheaper fabrication method. The purpose of the current study is to analyze the performance of the blades, which are mainly controlled by four factors, namely the root fold-axis, tip fold-axis, root fold, and tip fold angles. The computational fluid dynamics results show that double-fold design configurations outperform single-fold configurations. For example, the highest peak power coefficient for the single-fold case (root fold-axis, root fold, and tip fold angles of 30°, 15°, and 0° respectively) is 0.2018, while it is 0.2565 for the double-fold case (root fold-axis, tip fold-axis, root fold, and tip fold angles of 30°, 30°, 37.5° and 30° respectively). These findings gave new insights into the relationships between the fold axes and fold angles and the power coefficients of the proposed double-fold blade design. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.