Design and Testing of Building Integrated Hybrid Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

Abstract

Building integrated wind turbine are considered as part of a group of technologies that are suitable for domestic micro-energy generation. Darrieus and Savonius turbines work efficiently in the urban environment at low wind speed, the Savonius rotor is self-starting and creates high torque but has low efficiency, while the Darrieus rotor is very efficient but does not self-start easily. Thus, the combination of these rotors as hybrid system would help to improve the overall efficiency of the wind turbines. The aim of this paper was to design, fabricate and experimentally investigate the performance of hybrid Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) on residential buildings. A building model with gable rooftop was design and fabricated for use in testing of the hybrid VAWT. The height of the hybrid VAWT was paced at Y = 150 mm above the rooftop. The results obtained from the studies showed that the hybrid VAWT mounted on the building rooftop yield up to 63% more energy compared to the bare-hybrid VAWT (without building). Similar improvement in performance of the hybrid VAWT is also observed in the rotational speed, mechanical power and the coefficient of torque, where the building integrated hybrid VAWT outperformed the bare-hybrid VAWT. Thus the results indicate that urban buildings are suitable for the mounting of the hybrid VAWT.