Design and Analysis of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Rotors

Abstract

With the shortage of fossil fuels, alternative energy has required for the increasing energy demands of the world. A wind turbine is a rotary device that extracts energy from the wind and converts wind energy into mechanical energy. For efficient utilization of the available wind energy, it is imperative to study the behavior and performance of the wind turbines subjected to aerodynamic and ambient conditions. In the present work NACA 0018 aerofoil wind turbine blade is used to modeling the vertical axis wind turbine rotors. The straight three bladed vertical axis wind turbine rotor is twisted to 45degrees and 90 degrees in order to improve the performance of rotor. By twisting the rotor by maintain the height and diameter of rotors the weight of rotor are significantly increased To decrease the weight without compromising the performance of the rotor the fiber reinforced composite materials are used. Which were fabricated from carbon, glass fibers, and epoxy resin have been used to increase the strength to weight ratio. For this purpose, the CFD analysis in ANSYS-FLUENT and structural analysis in ANSYS of a straight and twisted three bladed vertical axis wind turbine rotor has been undertaken. Due to limitations on experimentation, the computational fluid approach has been used to quantify the wind loads on the blades. On further application of these loads, the structural behavior of the rotor is obtained for a predetermined set of operating conditions. The results from the analysis are compared with pre-existing ones for the purpose of validation.