Numerical investigation of the aerodynamic performance for the newly designed cavity vane type vertical axis wind turbine

Abstract

Research and development activities in the field of renewable energy, especially wind and solar, have been considerably increased, due to the worldwide energy crisis and high global emission. However, the available technical designs are not yet adequate to develop a reliable distributed wind energy converter for low wind speed conditions. The last few years have proved that Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs) are more suitable for urban areas than Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWTs). To date, very little has been published in this area to assess good performance and lifetime of VAWTs either in open or urban areas. The power generated by vertical axis wind turbines is strongly dependent on the aerodynamic performance of the turbines. The main goal of this current research is to investigate numerically the aerodynamic performance of a newly designed cavity type vertical axis wind turbine. In the current new design the power generated depends on the drag force generated by the individual blades and interactions between them in a rotating configuration. For numerical investigation, commercially available computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software GAMBIT and FLUENT were used. In this numerical analysis the Shear Stress Transport (SST) k-ω turbulence model is used which is better than the other turbulence models available as suggested by some researchers. The computed results show good agreement with published experimental results.