Design and Analysis of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Booster at Low Wind Speed

There is an increasing global concernto find the methods to optimize renewable energy resources. In these renewable energy resources wind energy is next most promising after solar energy. But these wind energy resources are much localized and selective. Whereas there is also a huge potential of wind resources available in low density or low wind speed. VAWT yields good performance in low wind speeds. In this study a Theoretical Wind Boosteris proposed to integrate with a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) having three blades to increase the power utilizationof low wind speed. This booster is designed and analyzed with the help of ANSYS Fluent Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) software. This booster performs a combinatory of concentrator and deflector, where it concentrateflow to leading blade and deflect flow from returning blade zone. The following conditions are simulated in ANSYS fluent for both standalone wind turbine and wind turbine with booster and performance characteristics such as angular velocity (ω), coefficient of moment (Cm) and coefficient of power (Cp) with respect to time are computed. These following characteristics are further analyzed in MATLAB Mathworksinc. software to obtain final steady state values of these characteristics. These results are compared from which it is perceived that the angular velocity of wind turbine with booster has increased significantly which results in increase of mechanical performance of the three bladed VAWT.