Study on the Performance of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine with Two Sets of Blades

Abstract This paper investigated the impact of added auxiliary blades on the performance of vertical axis wind turbine through adjusting blade spacing and blade pitch angle by means of experimentation. The results show that a critical value of blade spacing affects the performance of turbine, and with the decrease of blade spacing, the output power coefficient of the turbine decreases but the automatic startup performance increases when under low tip speed ratio. In addition, the output power of pitch angle β was the largest when it was 3°, which increased by 3.9% compared with that of 0°. The power of pitch angle β was relatively close in the range of -3°∼5°.