Design of a miniature wind turbine for powering wireless sensors

In this paper, a miniature wind turbine (MWT) system composed of commercially available off-the-shelf components was designed and tested for harvesting energy from ambient airflow to power wireless sensors. To make MWT operate at very low air flow rates, a 7.6 cm thorgren plastic Propeller blade was adopted as the wind turbine blade. A sub watt brushless DC motor was used as generator. To predict the performance of the MWT, an equivalent circuit model was employed for analyzing the output power and the net efficiency of the MWT system. In theory, the maximum net efficiency 14.8% of the MWT system was predicted. Experimental output power of the MWT versus resistive loads ranging from 5 ohms to 500 ohms under wind speeds from 3 m/s to 4.5 m/s correlates well with those from the predicted model, which means that the equivalent circuit model provides a guideline for optimizing the performance of the MWT and can be used for fulfilling the design requirements by selecting specific components for powering wireless sensors.