Numerical and Experimental Investigations of Bladeless Wind Turbine for Green Energy Applications

Abstract

Green energy applications have been a promising research area last two decades. One of these applications is using the power of wind for electrical power generation; wind turbines with different designs have great importance in this field. However, capturing energy from wind by using traditional wind farms has several limitations such as large installation space, specified airflow conditions, shading effect, noise, and design and maintenance complexity. Bladeless wind turbines have been used to convert wind energy into useful kinetic energy to overcome these obstacles. This paper introduces numerical and experimental investigations of a bladeless wind turbine for harvesting energy from wind. The proposed design has a cylindrical structure to resonate at a wide range of wind speeds and directions, which can maximize the harvested energy. Eigen-frequency simulation modules were developed to determine the structure's natural frequencies and mode shapes which aimed for continuous tunning with the generated vortex shed frequency. Furthermore, the numerical investigations extended to simulate the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis to accurately define the dynamic response of the bladeless wind turbine under different air-flow conditions. The resulting kinetic energy is delivered to an alternator to convert it into electrical power.