An Experiment on Horizontal and Vertical Wind Turbines with Incorporation of Rounded Shroud Device Using Wind Simulation in a Vehicle

The detrimental impact on the environment over the utilization of the conventional energy based fossil fuel is obvious. Thus, the effort on the reduction on the dependency on this unclean fuel is salient. The application of the clean renewable wind power can be one of the appropriate measures in supporting the effort in reducing the dependency on the unclean fuel. Performance is one of the essential aspects in determining the economic attractiveness on the technology application. One of the factors responsible to the performance of the power technology is the wind velocity acting on the rotor blade. The addition of a shroud element is believed to have a great promise to increase the velocity at rotor, thus possibly improving the performance of the wind turbine. This study presents an experiment on horizontal and vertical wind turbines incorporated with rounded shroud devices. The experiment is conducted in a vehicle to simulate the effect of the flow of wind. The results on this experiment indicate that the addition of the shroud device with geometry of diffuser improves the performance of the horizontal axis wind turbine. For the nozzle shroud geometry, it seems to less significantly improve the performance of the horizontal axis wind turbine. For the vertical turbine, the incorporation of the shroud devices, both nozzle and diffuser, has almost no effect to increase the performance. This study also presents the discussion for the reasons behind the experimental results by relating to the condition of the turbine rotation and the wind velocity inside the shroud devices.