Numerical and Experimental Study on Performance Enhancement of Darrieus Vertical Axis Wind Turbine With Wingtip Devices

Abstract

Darrieus type vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) are being used commercially nowadays; however, they still need to improve in terms of performance as they work in an urban environment where the wind speeds are low and the gusts are frequent. The aerodynamic performance of Darrieus turbine is highly affected by the wingtip vortices. This paper attempts at analyzing and comparing the performance of Darrieus with the use of various wingtip devices. Attempts have also been made to find out optimal working parameters by studying the flow through turbines with different tip speed ratios and different inlet wind speeds. A comparative computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was performed on a small-scale, straight-bladed Darrieus rotor vertical axis wind turbine, with a large stationary domain and a small rotating subdomain using sliding mesh technique. Comparison of the performance of end tip device that can be used against a baseline rotor configuration is done, with the aim of identifying the best tip architecture. The main focus lies on building an experimental setup to validate the results obtained with the CFD simulation and to compare the performance with and without wingtip device. VAWTs with wingtip device show very promising results compared to the baseline model.