Design and Modeling of Straight-Blade Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

Abstract

Pakistan is one of those countries which has large potential of energy harvest from renewable energy sources and specially from wind. With the surge of global warming, the world is moving towards cleaner and viable sources of energy. Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWT) currently dominates the most of the wind power farm markets in the world but Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT) are also capable of harvesting large amounts of energy with benefits over the HAWTS. VAWTS do not need a control system to be pointed in the direction of wind because with its blade in radial arrangement, wind from any direction is useful. In this report, a Straight-Blade VAWT is designed for low speeds and its performance parameters are also identified for which the improvement of the VAWT will be obtained. Self-starting ability of VAWT is also analyzed and stress and vibration analysis will be investigated in ANSYS Fluent.