Low Cost Portable Wind Power Generation For

Mobile Charging Applications

Vinushika Panchalogaranjan Visvakumar Aravinthan
Ratnakumar Rajan
Department of Electrical and Department of Electrical and
Department of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering Computer Science
Electronic Engineering
University of Jaffna Wichita State University
University of Jaffna
Kilinochchi, Sri Lanka Wichita,Kansas, USA
Kilinochchi, Sri Lanka
vinushika94@gmail.com
rajanratnakumar@gmail.com visvakumar.aravinthan@wichita.edu

Vinothine Shanmugarajah
Tharmarajah Thiruvaran
Department of Electrical and
Department of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering
Electronic Engineering
University of Jaffna
University of Jaffna
Kilinochchi, Sri Lanka
Kilinochchi, Sri Lanka
svinothine@eng.jfn.ac.lk
thiruvaran@eng.jfn.ac.lk

Abstract— Wind energy based power generation has
become one of the focal points in the research of renewable
energy sources. Mobile phones are essential communication
devices nowadays but still people face difficulties in mobile
phone charging where the utility supply is not available. This
paper presents a design and implementation of a small scale
low speed wind power based portable mobile phone charger.
The implementation includes a savonius wind turbine and a
controller. According to the speed change of the wind, the
output voltage of the generator changes from 1V to 3V so a
controller is designed to control a DC- DC boost converter to
get a constant output voltage. The formal approach of the PI
control scheme is used in the design of the controller. The
integrated device is able to produce the desired output
voltage to charge the mobile phone. This device provides
green energy for mobile phone charging where the utility is
not available.
Keywords—Portable, Savonius wind turbine, boost
converter, PI controller
I. INTRODUCTION
As the result of the increasing cost and environmental
pollution concerns of the power generation from fossil
fuels, nowadays the power generation is moved towards
the renewable energy sources. Modern wind turbines are
designed in such a way to produce energy in a reasonable
cost. Big constructions of wind turbines are widely used
for a bulk generation of power to be supplied to the local
grid. The Construction cost of these wind turbines is high
and they are not suitable for portable applications.So
small-scale Portable Wind Turbines will be the appropriate
solution for harvesting wind power for small home
applications .
Mobile phones have become a most essential
electronic device in people’s daily lives. Users always
prefer mobile phones with advanced technology. However,
there is a difficulty to charge the phone battery which is
commonly due to a power supply problem when people are
traveling to places where the utility is not available. The
battery still cannot meet the increasing power demand due
to the rapidly increasing functionalities and features of the
mobile phones. Battery banks are used for charging but
these batteries also have the limited capacity and need the
utility supply to be recharged. Therefore, it is highly
desirable to reduce the dependency of the mobile phone
battery charging on the power supply by harvesting wind
energy from the environment. So the mobile charging
application is appropriate for the application of small scale
wind power generation.
There are some proposed designs which can be
attached with vehicles to charge the mobile phones as there
will be a high speed wind while driving. Ali, Kharudin
designed and implemented a portable mobile phone
charger which can be attached to vehicles [1]. Another
technique used to harvest wind power in constant speed, is
a horizontal axis wind turbine which fixed in the axis of
rotation parallel to the exhaust fan of the cooling tower to
extract the wind power as a power recovery system [2].
Joni Welman, and Kristiantho Sulistiohadi designed low
cost portable wind power generator by using PC fans
which also can be used when traveling in vehicles [3].In
the above mentioned designs they get enough wind speed
to generate the required voltage level. In kilinochchi, many
people are dependent on farming. So they used to spend
most of their time in the paddy field in the evening and
they stay at the paddy field at night as well. Thus they may
not be able to get the utility supply to charge their mobile
phones. Some other people like night guards who work
outdoors also cannot access the utility supply. Hikers and
back packers are also unable to charge their mobile phones
while traveling. In these cases, it will be only possible to
get low wind speed. So the challenge is to charge the
mobile phones at low wind speed at these scenarios.
There are two major types of turbines in the basis of
their orientation of the axis of rotation. They are Vertical
Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) and Horizontal Axis Wind
Turbine (HAWT). Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines have
more efficient aerodynamic performance for higher wind
speed but has to be adjusted perpendicular to the wind
direction. VAWT has low starting wind speed and capable
of catching wind from multi directions. Although VAWT
is less efficient than HAWT in aerodynamic performance,
it is commonly used for low power applications due to its
good starting torque, low cost and low starting wind speed
[4]. As the wind speed varies the generated voltage will
also vary. So a controlled voltage regulation circuit has to

978-1-5386-9418-3/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE

be used to get the output to charge the mobile phone. The available material. The turbine design using “SolidWorks”
dynamic control of DC-DC boost converter theory is used software is given in Fig. 2.
to generate the desired output voltage in this project. The
mathematical model of the boost converter is derived and
that model is used for the controller design. The controller
is first simulated and then implemented by using
microcontroller. Finally the controller is integrated with
the device.

II. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

Fig. 2 Turbine designed using SolidWorks

Fig. 1 Block diagram of the system

A. Turbine Design
Selecting and designing the proper small scale turbine
is important to extract the required power. The main
requirements for the turbine are: (i) easily implementable
design by using locally available products (ii) working in
low heights (iii) cost effective. Therefore, Savonius turbine
is selected as it satisfies the requirements [4]. But the
efficiency of the Savonius turbine is very low compared to
other types thus the power obtainable from the turbine has Fig. 3 Wind turbine
to be optimized to increase the efficiency.
B. DC Generator Selection
The obtainable power (Pw) by a wind turbine from the While selecting the DC generator, the rated speed,
wind is given as torque and output voltage were considered. For our
requirements the DC generator should be low speed, fairly
reliable and efficient in light winds for charging batteries.
(1) Turbine rotational speed is measured to obtain the
Where appropriate DC generator ratings. The wind speed is
measured with the anemometer and the respective
rotational speed is measured by using the tachometer. The
- Power Coefficient
variation of the turbine rotational speed with the wind
ρ - Air density
speed is shown in Fig. 4.
A - Cross section area
v - Velocity of the wind

So, the parameters that we can change for the optimized

design are power coefficient (Cp) and wind catchment
area (A). Cp can be improved by the optimal blade design,
letting appropriate air gap and improvement in mechanical
setup. When we consider the wind catchment area, it
should be increased to obtain more power. But the device
has to be small and portable.
A two blade savonius rotor is selected which shows better
performance than three blade rotor [5]. The Savonius
turbine has three main parameters to be changed that are
height of the blade, diameter of the blade and the air gap
between the blades. The height (H) of the turbine is
selected as 28 cm for the convenience with diameter (D) Fig. 4 Variation of turbine rotational speed with wind speed
of 13.5 cm. The air gap (a) of the turbine is 15% of the
diameter which is proven as optimum air gap of a From the Turbine rotational speed graph, we can observe
savonius rotor. [7] Aluminum is selected as the turbine that it maximum rotational speed is about 350 rpm at 7
blade material as it is a light weighted and locally m/s.
Here the maximum wind speed is selected as 350rpm integral constants. The steps of the formal approach are
rotational speed, the average wind speed is 6m/s. So the shown in Fig. 6. After the design of the control scheme it
DC generator has to be selected as it gives about 1 V to is implemented using a microcontroller similar to [10].
3 V at the changing rotational speed of the turbine. The
output voltage is approximately proportional to the turbine
rotational speed. From these readings we came to a
decision to select a 6 V DC generator with a rotational
speed of 600 to 800 rpm or 12 V 1200 to 1400 rpm
generator so that we will be able to obtain an input voltage
in the range of approximately 1V to 3 V. 12 V DC motor
is selected as DC generator as per availability. Pulley belt
drive setup is used to get the desirable 1V to 3V output Fig. 5 Block diagram of the control strategy
from the generator.

C. DC-DC Boost Converter Design

The voltage output which we get from the DC generator
cannot be directly used to charge the mobile phone
because that voltage is smaller than the required voltage.
DC-DC Boost converters are widely used in industrial
applications to get a high output voltage from a lower
voltage supply. Boost converter parameters which are
inductor and capacitor values have to be designed. The
inductor value is selected in order to keep a continuous
output current which means to keep the boost converter in
continuous conduction mode. The capacitor selection is
done based on the ripple voltage. Normally the capacitor Fig. 6 Formal approach of controller design
is selected to keep the ripple below one percentage.
Accordingly the parameters of the boost converters are The Transfer function of the boost converter is derived
found as below. as shown in equation 2 and the selected control structure
is show in equation 3.
 Capacitor value – 30 μF
 Inductor value - 1 mH

The boost converter produces a constant output voltage (2)

for a constant input voltage. Because the input voltage is
varying as wind speed varies, a controller has to be
designed to get a constant output from the boost converter.
(3)
D. Controller Design
A controller design is necessary to ensure the performance
and overcome the fluctuations in the input voltage. So to
develop a controller the boost converter has to be
modeled. A typically used model is the averaged model,
which describes the converter behavior at the operating
point [8]. From this model we derive the state equation
and output equation for the small signal model of the
boost converter. This model is finally used to get the
transfer function of the boost converter. Then a control
scheme has to be applied. PI and the fuzzy control
schemes are widely used for DC-DC converters [9]. The
PI control scheme was selected for this project as it is
more suitable and simple than the other schemes for this Fig. 7 Root locus of the closed loop system of the boost converter
application. This method can be used in two types of
approaches, The root locus of the system shown in Fig. 7 can be
1. Trial and error approach plotted by using the plant transfer function and control
2. Root locus technique structure. The step responses for different values of the
These approaches are used to find the proportional and gain can be plotted by selecting a pole point in the root
integration constants of the controller for desired locus of the system. So after analyzing various gain
performance. Trial and error approach is tuning the values, 0.06 was selected as the suitable gain value by
controller directly on the system which is difficult to find comparing the overshoot and rise time parameters.
the appropriate values. The root locus technique is using
the root locus to find the values of the proportional and
 Fig. 8 Simulation model of the system
The step response for the gain is shown in Fig. 9. Next,
the design of the boost converter is implemented in
simulation as shown in Fig. 8. A voltage signal with step
changes is applied as the input of the boost converter. The
output voltage simulation results are show in the Fig. 10.
An output voltage of 5 V is observed with fluctuations
about less than 1 V. We can observe that the output
voltage is immediately settling down to 5 V after a
fluctuation occurs when there are step changes in the input
voltage.
Fig. 9 Step response of the boost converter system for a gain of 0.06
Fig. 10 Input and output voltages of the boost converter
III. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The output voltages which we got from the DC generator
at various wind speed are shown in Fig. 11. The varying
wind speed is generated using a fan from 3 m/s to 7 m/s.
A voltage of 0.9 V was generated at a speed of 3 m/s as
can be seen from Fig. 11. So the minimum speed to get
the desirable output was identified as 3m/s.
Fig. 11 Variation of open circuit voltage with wind speed
Fig. 12 Variation of output power with wind speed
The output voltage of the DC generator is fed to the boost
converter and an output voltage of 5 V is generated from
the converter under varying wind speed conditions. The
respective power curve is shown in Fig. 12. The power
output at the possible maximum wind speed of 7 m/s is
140 mW. This power is limited due to the inefficiency of
the device.
IV. CONCLUSION
The proposed device is suitable for power generation from
low speed wind energy for mobile charging. It was able to
get the desired output voltage. But the power was limited
as the efficiency of the device was low. So the charging
will take longer time than regular charging.
The efficiency of the device can be improved by
improving several properties of the device. The turbine
blades can be designed focusing on increasing the
extracted power from wind. More efficient DC generator
can be replaced to generate more power. So by improving
these properties the output power can be increased. So
natural energy can be utilized effectively by using this
device. The wind power generation mobile charger is also
portable, cost-effective and energy efficient.
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