Development of an Experimental Setup for Double Rotor HAWT Investigation

An experimental set-up was designed and constructed to study the performance of single and double rotor Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWT) configurations. Different tip speed ratios (TSR) were tested under varying wind loadings. The experimental study was carried out in order to investigate the HAWT performance and thereby increase its aerodynamics efficiency. Another setup was built to measure the torque rotational speed characteristic of the generator. The double rotor configuration was chosen intentionally to study the efficiency improvements when the second downstream rotor extracts the kinetic energy dismissed by the upstream rotor. The study showed that the power coefficient can be indeed increased about 50% with a double rotor HAWT configuration, and the power gained from a counter rotating rotor is higher than that of a co-rotating rotor owing to the effect of the wake of the upstream rotor. In addition, a theoretical analysis of wake effect of the upstream rotor on the downstream rotor including the effect of the distance between the two rotors on the total power coefficient was made and investigated experimentally in order to estimate the optimum distance between the two rotors.