Optimum design parameters for a venturi-shaped roof to maximize the performance of building-integrated wind turbines

Abstract

Venturi-shaped roofs provide advantageous wind conditions for efficiently operating building-integrated wind turbines without losing usable floor area. Despite these advantages, venturi-shaped roofs have been sparsely adopted for buildings due to the lack of understanding of their optimum designs to maximize the performance of building-integrated wind turbines. For the first time in literature, this study investigated four design parameters: support structure, corner modification, tunnel shape, and wind turbine arrangement to estimate the optimum venturi-shaped roof design by conducting Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. The results revealed the advantages of shorter support structures with convex and concave shapes at upwind and downwind ends, creating high wind speeds with low turbulence intensities. Corner modifications to the tunnel's entrance and exit are vital to suppress flow separation at the tunnel's entrance and uniform distributions of wind speed and pressure. This study recommends aerodynamic tunnel shapes that follow a non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) to accelerate wind without increasing turbulence intensities. The optimum design parameters performed better in normal and oblique wind directions, confirming their universal applicability. This study proposes integrating all optimum design parameters into a venturi-shaped roof design to alleviate the adverse effects of support structures, which are essential for a stable roof design.