<p>The demand for wind turbines has increased ever since fossil fuels showed symbols of quick depletion. Among wind turbines VAWT is compact, produce less noise, Omni-directional, resilient to turbulent flow and easy to maintain. Due to these reasons, VAWT’s are more suitable for small scale rooftop installations in urban and rural areas. Although they seem to be more beneficial than HAWT, VAWTs have their own disadvantages like poor self-starting characteristics and low efficiency. The performance of VAWT is not comprehensively studied due to their aerodynamic complexities. The power generated by a VAWT is a function of a non-dimensional geometric parameter known as solidity (s) which is a function of turbine diameter (D), blade chord (c) and the number of blades (n). Solidity is the ratio of the total blade area in a turbine with the swept area of the turbine.&nbsp;The present work analyses the impact of solidity (0.12 and&nbsp;&nbsp;0.18) as a complete non-dimensional parameter on wind turbine performance. Each parameter of solidity is varied keeping any one of the parameters constant and numerically studied for its performance across a range of tip speed ratio (TSR). For each solidity, 6 different combinations of VAWT geometric parameters were analyzed.&nbsp;&nbsp;In all the cases the chord Reynolds number is kept constant.&nbsp;CFD simulation was performed on the Darrius H-type (NACA0018 airfoil) VAWT. &nbsp;Two dimensional (2D)&nbsp; computational domains are used to study the effect on the performance of the turbine as the solidity studied is less than 0.4. The computational domain was created in GAMBIT. The 2D computational domain is 40D × 45D, where the distance from the turbine centre to domain inlet and outlet are 15D and 30D. The diameter of the rotating core is 2.5D. Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-strokes (URANS) equation is used to solve the CFD model using ANSYS Fluent 19.1 with 2<sup>nd</sup> order spatial discretization and 4-equation transition SST k-ω for turbulence modelling.&nbsp;The comprehensive study of the turbine performance keeping the turbine operation within a constant Re number range shows the Coefficient of Performance (Cp) overlaps for a given solidity.&nbsp;</p>

Effect of Solidity on Performance of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Using Constant Chord Reynolds Number

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/GTINDIA/GTINDIA2021/volume/85536

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