Performance Evolution of a Small Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

S. TOURN; J. PALLARES; I. CUESTA

Tarragona

Exposición; 9th Poster Exhibition; 2011

Universitat Rovira i Virgili. Departamento de Ingeniería Química y Mecánica.

Abstract:The recent climate change concern and the implementation of energy policies to encourage the use of renewable energy have made the wind power industry to a significant contributor of power and energy production. The type of a wind turbine generator which has been used in our study is a vertical axis wind turbine generator (VAWT). One of the advantages of this type of generators is their design, which permits them to be located on the vicinity of houses, buildings or industrial zones.However, in many cases, the VAWTs are close to the land surface where the wind velocity is lower, and therefore, an additional amount of energy has to be used for their activation.The main objective of this research project is to achieve a significant improvement of VAWT?s performance by means of reducing the external energy needed for its activation. In order to achieve that, it is necessary to conduct a combination of numerical and experimental studies on the turbine blades aerodynamics. The first step of the experimental study is to design an Open-Jet Wind Tunnel using an analytical calculus based on literature review. Afterwards, a computer simulation of the designed wind tunnel is performed to predict the flow behaviour in each section of the tunnel. The CFD code FLUENT with the RNG k-epsilon turbulence model is used to accomplish this task. The results of the simulation have shown that, even with vortices in the settling chamber are present, The velocity profile computed in the test section is in close agreement with the previous analytical results.