Enhancement of the performance of vertical axis wind rotors with straight blades

Abstract

In this study, it has been aimed to improve the performance of vertical axis wind rotors with straight blades. For this purpose, an additional performance-enhancing setup has been used, placed in front of the vertical axis wind rotor with straight blades, in order to increase the performance. The effects on the rotor performance increase have been investigated numerically by keeping the dimensions of this performance-enhancing additional setup constant, by changing the number of blades of the straight bladed rotor and by changing the blade angles if the straight blades have been angled. Numerical analyzes performed in this study have been validated by experimental literature data. After creating the solid models required for the rotor performance analysis, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program ANSYS Fluent has been used. Here, studies have been carried out with two, three and four bladed rotors as the number of blades. As the blade angle, the effects of the angles between 180 and 120 have been examined. As a result of the study with the additional performance setup (APS), it has been determined that the optimum performance has been obtained with the vertical axis rotor with three blades and 150 blade angle. As a final result, it has been determined that the power coefficient obtained from the optimum vertical axis rotor with additional performance setup increased approximately 2.6 times compared to the optimum rotor without setup.