Study on benefit of guide vane for vertical axis wind

Abstract

Guide vane was introduced to overcome the problem of high turbulence intensity due to the high rise building in the urban area. The guide vane is a fixed aerofoil that directs air into the moving wind turbine. Guide vane borders the Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) and improves the VAWT performance by increasing the wind velocity, decreasing turbulence intensity and increasing torque because it acts as wind concentrator and wind shielding to an optimum angle before it interacts with turbines. This project is based on the VAWT on the College of Engineering (COE) building in Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN). This VAWT had been fabricated in CREO software to study the benefit of guide vane onto it and the design of guide vane also was constructed by using similar software. SOLIDWORKS Flow simulation was used to analyze the performance of the VAWT. The simulation had been done by simulation of VAWT without and with guide vane to study the benefit and analyze the flow characteristic of the guide vane towards wind turbine. The simulation result shows that the presence of guide vane increase wind speed by maximum 0.0051 m/s and torque increment is about seven times from VAWT without guide vane. Other than that, decreasing of turbulence intensity value also detected in flow simulation result. To sum up, guide vane had the potential to be installed in the urban area because it improves the power output of the wind turbine.