Hi Bilal,

Honestly, for what its worth, I would say that if you want to design a wind
turbine, do it using existing aerofoil profiles and data for the moment at
least. Its best to leave aerofoil design and testing to people who've been
doing it a while and who have the expertise, experience, facilities, time
and financial resources for both the model building and wind-tunnel testing
required. Aerofoils are notorious for not having read the same aerodynamic
texts as you have and don't perform exactly the same as even the best
simulation programs predict! Even wind-tunnel test results should be read
with caution. Read Prof. Michael Selig's stuff on how some of his best
design efforts sometimes perform brilliantly and sometimes just don't do
what they're supposed to! (See below for reference: Selig et al 1989 )

You should be able to find suitable existing profiles for your designs.
Main requirements are:

1) Ease of manufacture by whatever method you're using

2) Structural stiffness and strength

3) A good lift-to-drag ratio over the range you want

4) Gentle stall

5) Roughness insensitivity

Then if you really find that nothing 'off-the-shelf' fulfils what you need,
*then* get yourself involved in aerofoil design.

If you really want to go ahead, I have used a program called Xfoil. It was
written by Mark Drela of MIT, but I've lost the contact details for
obtaining it so you'll have to do a search.

Xfoil was written for the purpose of designing and/or modifying aerofoil
profiles and for simulating their characteristics and gives reasonable
results. I used it purely for simulation. You do need to have some
understanding of what boundary layers get up to in order to get sensible
results. It was designed for, and has a good reputation for coping
reasonably well with, the peculiarities of low Reynold's number though it
is a few years old now.

However, you should not rely purely on simulated results from even the best
software when it comes to aerofoils. You should only design your own
profiles if you have the expertise, facilities and resources to test them
afterwards in a wind tunnel.

References for data on existing aerofoil profiles:

Abbott I. and von Dönhoff A. 'Theory of Wing Sections', Dover Publications
Inc., New York, 1947

Selig M.S., Donovan J.F. and Fraser D.B. 'Airfoils at low speeds',
Soartech 8, H.A.Stokely (publisher) 1504 North Horseshoe Corcle, Virginia
Beach, Virginia 23451 USA, 1989
This comes with the data on a diskette as well as in print - very helpful.

Giguère P. and Selig M.S. 'Low Reynolds number airfoils for small
horizontal axis wind turbines', Wind Engineering Vol.21, No.6, 1997

Miley S.J. 'A catalog of low Reynold's number airfoil data for wind
turbine applications', Rockwell International Corp., Golden, Colorado,
USA, 1982

Riegels F.W. 'Aerofoil Sections, Results from Wind Tunnel Investigations,
Theoretical Foundations' (Transl. fr. German), Butterworths, London, 1961

Tangler J.L. and Somers D.M. 'Advanced Airfoils for HAWTS'

For NACA/NASA data try:
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~tomek/CFD/refs/naca.html

Somewhere on the NASA server there's a page with data on all the NACA/NASA
profiles but I don't know the URL. Try searching from here:
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/NASA_homepage.html or here:
http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/NTRS

For other stuff about aerofoils for wind, have a look at:

Anderson R.F. 'The aerodynamic characteristics of airfoils at negative
angles of attack', NACA Technical Note No. 412

Butterfield C.P., Scott G. and Musial W. 'Comparison of wind tunnel
airfoil performance data with wind turbine test data', Transactions of the
ASME - Journal of Solar Energy Engineering, Vol. 114 pp119-124, May 1992

Drela M. and Giles M. 'ISES; a two-dimensional viscous aerodynamic design
and analysis code' AIAA Paper 87-0424, Jan. 1987

Drela M. 'Low Reynolds-number airfoil design for the MIT Daedalus
prototype: a case study', Journal of Aircraft Vol.25 No.8 AIAA Inc. 1988

Griffiths R.T. 'The effect of aerofoil characteristics on windmill
performance', Technical note, paper no. 251, Aeronautical Journal, July 1977

Jamieson P. and Rawlinson-Smith R. 'High Lift Aerofoils for Horizontal Axis
Wind Turbines' 16th Annual BWEA conf, Stirling ,Scotland, 1994

Wilson R.E., Lissaman B.S. and Walker S.N. 'Aerodynamic performance of
wind turbines', Oregon State University, June 1976


At 18:46 05/09/01 +0500, "BILAL RAUF KHAN" <mian@...> wrote:
>respected group members,
>
>i am interested in software through which i can design the whole wind
turbine.
>i want calculate the profile of blades and output characteristics from
that software.
>if any body knew about this please let me know also.
>

end
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