Design and Flow Simulation of Concentrator Augmented Wind Turbine

Abstract

In order for wind technology to compete with conventional sources of energy in terms of energy production costs, researchers are working on different ways to increase the energy density in wind and therefore augment wind turbine power output. Concentrator augmented wind turbines (CAWTs) have been thought to be one of the ways to augment wind turbine power output and hence improve the cost effectiveness of wind energy. This concept involves enclosing the wind turbine rotor with a duct that reduces in cross-sectional area downstream of the blade-plane and hence increasing mass flow rate through the turbine. No efforts have been done to commercialize this concept because little is known about the wind flow behaviour in the CAWT, its influence on turbine power output and the optimum concentrator design parameters. The main objective of this research is to propose a new design for CAWT and optimize the concentrator design parameters. Furthermore, the effect of wind velocity and air pressure on the proposed design concepts are also investigated. Four different CAWT design concepts were designed and simulated using Solidworks and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool Ansys Fluent, respectively. The wind velocity and air pressure vs. the position of convergent nozzle were plotted. Results showed an outstanding improvement in wind speed, which is 16.1 m/s (5.4 times increment), over the 3 m/s inlet wind velocity in the design concept 3 (CAWT 3.0) with the nozzle angle 20°.