Abstract
Even though the recent development trend of wind turbine systems has been focused on larger MW Classes, the small-scale wind turbine system has been continuously developed because it has some advantages due to easy personnel establishment and use with low cost and energy saving effect. This work is to propose a specific structural design and analysis procedure for development of a low noise 500W class small wind turbine system which will be applicable to relatively low wind speed region like Korea. The proposed structural feature has a skin-spar-foam sandwich composite structure with the E-glass/Epoxy face sheets and the Urethane foam core for lightness, structural stability, low manufacturing cost and easy manufacturing process. Moreover this type of structure has good behaviors for reduction of vibration and noise. Structural analysis including load cases, stress, deformation, buckling and vibration was performed using the Finite Element Method. In order to evaluate the designed blade structure the structural tests were done, and their test results were compared with the estimated results.