The Random Thoughts of a Geek heading for Banbury
The Random Thoughts of a Geek heading for Banbury

QBlade for #Makevember

QBlade Rotors
QBlade logo
QBlade logo

After my previous attempts at cadding up air foils, that can be found here and here for #Makevember, I came across QBlade; According to Wikipedia:

QBlade is an open source wind turbine calculation software, distributed under the GNU General Public License. The software is seamlessly integrated into XFOIL, an airfoil design and analysis tool. The purpose of this software is the design and aerodynamic simulation of wind turbine blades. The integration in XFOIL allows for the user to rapidly design custom airfoils and compute their performance curves, Extrapolating the performance data to a range of 360°Angle of attack, and directly integrate them into a wind turbine rotor simulation. The integration of QBlade into XFLR’s sophisticated graphical user interface makes this software accessible to a large potential user community.

QBlade is especially adequate for teaching, as it provides a ’hands-on’ feeling for HAWT rotor design and shows all the fundamental relationships between blade twist, blade chord, section airfoil performance, turbine control, power and load curves in an easy and intuitive way. QBlade also includes post processing of conducted rotor simulations and gives deep insight into all relevant blade and rotor variables.

While arguably this is not a proper #Makevember post (not least because its no longer November…), I have learnt more about the subject of air foil design and my limitations of the subject.

Getting Started

One of the fun things about QBlade is that it is a project that is written for Windows or Linux, and there is no realised macOS binaries. To get over this I tried running it in a Windows XP VM, and it wasn’t having any of that… so now I am running it in a Windows 7 VM.

QBlade is portable so it doesn’t need to be installed, and will run right from the zip file.

And as luck would have it; this is the point at where it chooses to crash out…

Crash Out…
Crash Out…

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