A Pilot Study of Vertical-Axis Turbine Wind Farm Layout Planning

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the parameters that affect the cost-effectiveness of wind farm land use and wind energy harvesting efficiency. The research team applies two reverse rotating vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) to explore how wind speed and various distances of wind turbines affect the operation efficiency of a prospective wind farm. A data acquisition system has been constructed to record the wind speed along with a variety of wind turbine output data in a wind tunnel test in order to identify the layout that help to achieve the best wind harvesting efficiency. The layout is then applied in the field test for further observation and data collection. The experiment results show 1) when two VAWTs are moved toward each other (from 300 cm to 180 cm), both turbines observe performance gain, and 2) when two VAWTs are set at a distance of 1.5 to 2.0 times the turbine diameter, the performance of both units increases by about 11% over the efficiency obtainable by their stand-alone counterpart.