Mini Wind Turbine for Small Scale Power Generation and Storage (Archimedes Wind Turbine Model)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ozeh ◽  
Ashreet Mishra ◽  
Xiuling Wang

The Archimedes wind turbine boasts an innovative blade design with the potential of harvesting energy from wind with much more efficiency. The blade design utilizes both lift and drag forces, and boasts several other advantages over conventional horizontal axis and vertical axis wind turbines, which implies higher power production efficiency and a possibility of being used in urban areas with attendant low wind speed regimes for small scale power generation, being more portable. However, there exists a dearth of experimental reports on the Archimedes wind turbine besides CFD simulations, to observe and study its real-life performance and power production potential. This paper is an experimental report on the design and wind test of the Archimedes wind turbine prototype, together with calculations made to gauge its tip speed ratio, power output and energy production potential. To show the viability of the prototype, the power produced is used to charge a HTC Desire cell phone, which proves that it can be relied upon to meet the title objective of small scale power storage with a power bank. Results are thereafter compared to other published work and show relatively good agreement. Minor deviations are attributed to the challenges encountered during the fabrication process.

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 63-71
Author(s):  
Yui-Chuin Shiah ◽  
Chia Hsiang Chang ◽  
Yu-Jen Chen ◽  
Ankam Vinod Kumar Reddy

ABSTRACT Generally, the environmental wind speeds in urban areas are relatively low due to clustered buildings. At low wind speeds, an aerodynamic stall occurs near the blade roots of a horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT), leading to decay of the power coefficient. The research targets to design canards with optimal parameters for a small-scale HAWT system operated at variable rotational speeds. The design was to enhance the performance by delaying the aerodynamic stall near blade roots of the HAWT to be operated at low wind speeds. For the optimal design of canards, flow fields of the sample blades with and without canards were both simulated and compared with the experimental data. With the verification of our simulations, Taguchi analyses were performed to seek the optimum parameters of canards. This study revealed that the peak performance of the optimized canard system operated at 540 rpm might be improved by ∼35%.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Ojing Siram ◽  
Niranjan Sahoo ◽  
Ujjwal K. Saha

Abstract The small-scale horizontal-axis wind turbines (SHAWTs) have emerged as the promising alternative energy resource for the off-grid electrical power generation. These turbines primarily operate at low Reynolds number, low wind speed, and low tip speed ratio conditions. Under such circumstances, the airfoil selection and blade design of a SHAWT becomes a challenging task. The present work puts forward the necessary steps starting from the aerofoil selection to the blade design and analysis by means of blade element momentum theory (BEMT) for the development of four model rotors composed of E216, SG6043, NACA63415, and NACA0012 airfoils. This analysis shows the superior performance of the model rotor with E216 airfoil in comparison to other three models. However, the subsequent wind tunnel study with the E216 model, a marginal drop in its performance due to mechanical losses has been observed.


Author(s):  
Sourabh Deshpande ◽  
Nithin Rao ◽  
Nitin Pradhan ◽  
John L. Irwin

Utilizing the advantages of additive manufacturing methods, redesigning, building and testing of an existing integral Savonius / Darrieus “Lenz2 Wing” style vertical axis wind turbine is predicted to improve power generation efficiency. The current wind turbine blades and supports made from aluminum plate and sheet are limiting the power generation due to the overall weight. The new design is predicted to increase power generation when compared to the current design due to the lightweight spiral Darrieus shaped hollow blade made possible by 3D printing, along with an internal Savonius blade made from aluminum sheet and traditional manufacturing techniques. The design constraints include 3D printing the turbine blades in a 0.4 × 0.4 × 0.3 m work envelope while using a Stratasys Fortus 400mc and thus the wind turbine blades are split into multiple parts with dovetail joint features, when bonded together result in a 1.2 m tall working prototype. Appropriate allowance in the mating dovetail joints are considered to facilitate the fit and bonding, as well as angle, size and placement of the dovetail to maximize strength. The spiral shape and Darrieus style cross section of the blade that provides the required lift enabling it to rotate from the static condition are oriented laterally for 3D printing to maximize strength. The bonding of the dovetail joints is carried out effectively using an acetone solution dip. The auxiliary components of the wind turbine which include the center support pole, top and bottom support, and center Savonius blades are manufactured using lightweight aluminum. Design features are included in the 3D printed blade parts so that they can be assembled with the aluminum parts in bolted connections. Analysis of the 3D CAD models show that the hybrid aluminum and hollow 3D printed blade construction provides a 50% cost savings over a 3D printed fully solid blade design while minimizing weight and maximizing the strength where necessary. Analysis of the redesign includes a detailed weight comparison, structural strength and the cost of production. Results include linear static finite element analysis for the strength in dovetail joint bonding and the aluminum to 3D printed connections. Additional data reported are the time frame for the design and manufacturing of the system, budget, and an operational analysis of the wind turbine with concern for safety. Results are analyzed to determine the advantages in utilizing a hybrid additive manufacturing and aluminum construction for producing a more efficient vertical axis wind turbine. Techniques used in the production of this type of wind turbine blade are planned to be utilized in similar applications such as a lightweight hovercraft propeller blade design to be tested in future research projects.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-415
Author(s):  
H. Abu-Thuraia ◽  
C. Aygun ◽  
M. Paraschivoiu ◽  
M.A. Allard

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° 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°.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bala Maheswaran ◽  
Alya Abd Aziz ◽  
Evan Alexander ◽  
Laura Brigandi ◽  
Cole Branagan

2019 ◽  
Vol 142 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Praveen Laws ◽  
Jaskaran Singh Saini ◽  
Ajit Kumar ◽  
Santanu Mitra

Abstract Savonius wind turbines are special class of vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs). These are low-cost drag-driven turbines and are known to be inefficient. It is proposed in this study that a simple modification to the turbine blade design can yield a significant improvement in power efficiency. The performance of the new design is extensively studied on openfoam-v1812, a popular open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) library. The flow equations coupled with equations of rotation of the turbine are solved on an overset mesh framework. This study also serves as a validation of recently released overset support in openfoam. The turbulence is incorporated by coupling Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) with shear stress transport (SST) κ − ω eddy viscosity turbulence model. The turbulence parameters are set to produce a flow with the Reynolds number, Re = 4.8 × 105. To have better confidence in simulations, this study also presents a comparison of numerical flow over conventional Savonius turbine designs with the published data. It is observed that a majority of CFD analysis on wind turbine designs are performed for the fixed tip speed ratio on a traditional static mesh structure. But, in this CFD study, a wind-driven rotation of Savonius turbine is simulated on an overset dynamics approach. The results of the study are compared and discussed based on the predicted moment and power coefficients, pressure variation on the blades, flow velocity field, and wake analysis. The study indicates that the blade design presented here has a potential to increase the power efficiency of a Savonius wind turbine by 10–28%.


Author(s):  
Emre Hasan Dursun ◽  
Ahmet Afsin Kulaksiz

AbstractWhile the use of renewable energy systems in electric power generation is increasing more and more, wind energy conversion systems (WECS) receive considerable attention among these. Thanks to the ability of power generation in all wind speed range by controlling the rotor speed, Variable Speed WECSs are more preferred than fixed speed WECSs. When considering small-scale applications in variable speed WECS, Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator (PMSG) based WECS structures are focus of the interest due to their advantages such as high efficiency and low maintenance costs. The generator must be operated at an optimum speed to obtain maximum power from the WECS. Moreover, different Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) methods can be used to control and determine optimal operating speed. In this paper, WECS configuration consists of PMSG, uncontrolled rectifier, DC link capacitor, DC-DC boost converter and DC-Bus. Capturing the maximum power from WECS and supplying the DC-Bus is performed via tip speed ratio and PI control (TSR-PI) based MPPT method. Moreover, two wind speed profiles having constant and instant changes are created to test the performance of the proposed method. For comparison purposes, perturbation & observation (P&O) based MPPT method is also carried out in here. According to obtained results from this study performed in Matlab/Simulink environment, it is verified that TSR-PI based MPPT method ensures higher power and efficiency for these wind speed profiles by means of a more successful generator speed tracking.


2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Sokolovs ◽  
L. Grigans ◽  
E. Kamolins ◽  
J. Voitkans

Abstract The authors present a small-scale wind turbine emulator based on the AC drive system and discuss the methods for power coefficient calculation. In the work, the experimental set-up consisting of an AC induction motor, a frequency converter, a synchronous permanent magnet generator, a DC-DC boost converter and DC load was simulated and tested using real-life equipment. The experimentally obtained wind turbine power and torque diagrams using the emulator are in a good agreement with the theoretical ones.


2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (0) ◽  
pp. 43-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daiki Taniguchi ◽  
Yuki Narisada ◽  
Hiroaki Yamada ◽  
Toshihiko Tanaka ◽  
Tomohiro Tamura ◽  
...  

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