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The present research proposes novel swept-curved bioinspired blades for Darrieus wind turbine. The design was influenced by the curved flippers of the bottle-nose dolphin. The proposed model was designed using the Solidworks software, empirically tested for power improvement, later fine-tuned adopting high fidelity numerical modeling. An in-depth analysis comparing the traditional H-bladed turbine with the new-bladed design was performed using OpenFOAM. Further, an elaborate experimental observations on the proposed design suggest that the model with 0.6c forward sweep outperformed the rest. The efficiency of the curved blade was notably enhanced by 14.41%, in contrast to the conventional model, and the numerical analysis endorses this observation. The modified turbine blades have the maximum wind streamlines that converge toward the center of the blade's trailing edge due to the lateral shift, and the resulting convergence reduces blade tip losses. The modified blade models demonstrated improved angular acceleration at a given wind speed, indicating enhanced efficiency and superior self-starting capabilities. Notably, these improvements were evident even at a lower wind speed of 4.2 m/s compared to the traditional H-model.
Prakash et al. (Thu,) studied this question.