Computational fluid dynamic analysis of roof-mounted vertical-axis wind turbine with diffuser shroud, flange, and vanes

摘要

Advances in wind power and tidal power have matured considerably to offer clean and sustainable energy alternatives. Nevertheless, distributed small-scale energy production from wind in urban areas has been disappointing because of very low efficiencies of the turbines. A novel wind turbine design-a seven-bladed Savonius vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) that is horizontally oriented inside a diffuser shroud and mounted on top of a building-has been shown to overcome the drawback of low efficiency. The objective this study was to analyze the performance of this novel wind turbine design for different wind directions and for different guide vanes placed at the entrance of the diffuser shroud. The flow field over the turbine and guide vanes was analyzed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) on a 3D grid for multiple tip-speed ratios (TSRs). Four wind directions and three guide-vane angles were analyzed. The wind-direction analysis indicates that the power coefficient decreases to about half when the wind is oriented at 45 degrees to the main axis of the turbine. The analysis of the guide vanes indicates a maximum power coefficient of 0.33 at a vane angle of 55 degrees.