UMass Amherst, Wind & Energy

African Windpower AWP3.6 Wind Turbine

Since early in the project, Dr. Utama Abdulwahid at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Wind Energy Center has been gracious in offering the team advice in set up and management of the anemometers and also in analyzing the data we’ve been gathering.

Dr. Abdulwahid has provided us with two methods of estimating the energy produced by the wind. A very simplified calculation:

Power in the wind = 0.5 x air density x swept area x average wind speed cubed 

A Child's Weather Station in Mzoma

A more complex method is based on the power curve of a specific turbine. The power curve values with the inputs of bin width, the average wind speed and the rated power (Watts) for the turbine return energy produced in kilowatts per hour. Since we haven’t identified a turbine manufacturer, or allocated resources to the production of a homemade turbine, we used the AWP3.6 Wind Generator manufactured by African Windpower as a model for beginning to estimate energy.

The graph to the right shows energy that would be generated by the AWP3.6 which has a rated wind speed of 12 m/sec. For this calculation an average wind speed of 5 m/sec was used. Total annual energy is estimated at 3.2 million kWh in a year. This total assumes the wind speeds follow the Raleigh distribution.