Design of rotor blades for vertical axis wind turbine with wind flow modifier for low wind profile areas

Abstract

This work focuses on the design and analysis of wind flow modifier (WFM) modeling of a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) for low wind profile urban areas. A simulation is carried out to examine the performance of an efficient low aspect ratio C-shaped rotor and a proposed involute-type rotor. Further, the WFM model is adapted with a stack of decreased diameter tubes from wind inlet to outlet. It accelerates the wind velocity, and its effectiveness is examined on the involute turbine. Numerical analysis is performed with a realizable K-ε model to monitor the rotor blade performance in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) ANSYS Fluent software tool. This viscous model with an optimal three-blade rotor with 0.96 m2 rotor swept area is simulated between the turbine rotational speeds ranging from 50 to 250 rpm. The parameters, such as lift–drag coefficient, lift–drag forces, torque, power coefficient, and power at various turbine speeds, are observed. It results in a maximum power coefficient of 0.071 for the drag force rotor and 0.22 for the lift force involute rotor. Moreover, the proposed WFM with an involute rotor extensively improves the maximum power coefficient to an appreciable value of 0.397 at 5 m/s wind speed, and this facilitates efficient design in the low wind profile area. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.