Computational design and optimisation of innovative, high-efficiency wind turbine

New concept of innovative, high-efficiency wind turbine has been developed and optimised. The turbine consists of a rotor with a vertical axis of rotation and a ring-palisade casing, which task is to deflect wind stream so that it flows perpendicularly to the rotor plane. The main advantage of such configuration of a wind turbine is that due to the vertical axis of symmetry, it works independently on the wind direction and it does not need any mechanism directing it towards the wind. The greatest challenge when designing the turbine was to minimise losses of energy of the wind stream deflected by 90 degrees by the ring vanes of the casing. This involved optimisation of number, shapes and mutual positions of the ring vanes. The whole optimisation works were done based on computational methods of Computer-Aided Design and Optimisation and Computational Fluid Dynamic. Subsequent variants of the ring-palisade casing were designed using an appropriately adapted in-house-software package supporting design and optimisation of multi-element airfoils. Three-dimensional analysis of flow around and inside the casing was conducted by application of commercial URANS solver ANSYS FLUENT. Eventually designed turbine is characterised by high efficiency in respect of acceleration of the wind stream. On the basis of computer simulations, it is estimated that the average velocity of air stream flowing through the rotor plane may be higher than the wind speed by about 45%. Extent of the acceleration of the wind stream partially depends on the number of ring vanes comprising a casing. Depending on specificity of application, this number of ring vanes may be chosen by a compromise between performance and dimensions of the turbine. The proposed wind turbine seems to be very promising solution, especially within the area of small and moderate renewable-energy sources, which in particular may be placed directly in residential-building areas, e.g. on the roofs of houses. This type of renewable-energy sources may also be successfully used in the field of environmentally friendly transport, in the process of producing hydrogen as fuel for fuel cell vehicles