Numerical Investigation on the Effects of Varying the Arc length of a Windshield on the Performance of a Highway Installed Banki Wind Turbine

Abstract

Two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are employed to investigate the effects of adding a circular-arc-shaped windshield on the performance of a Banki type vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT), particularly to the application where the VAWT is harnessing wind energy in highway caused by the passing vehicles. Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) is the computational approach used to calculate the turbulent flow within the domain. Two sets of simulation cases based on two different vehicles (i.e., car and a bus) are performed with varying arc-length of the windshield. The results show that the windshield provides an increase in the energy captured by the VAWT by up to 16.14% compared to no windshield case when the car model is used. In contrast, windshield in all the simulation cases using a bus model gives a negative effect to VAWT performance where the worst case yields −64.77%.