CFD investigation on the jet-engine inspired wind turbine

Abstract

The Malaysian Government has set a more ambitious target to achieve higher penetration of Renewable Energy (RE) in the Malaysian energy mix which was 31% by 2025. Compared to the penetration of solar and wind power specifically in the European region, whose sharing was more than 50% of total generation, Malaysia currently only has 2% of its energy coming from RE generation sources, which mostly was provided by solar photovoltaic. In Malaysia’s energy sources point of view, wind RE-based power generation system was foreseen a promising potential provided the technology was suitably designed for low wind conditions. Therefore, the potentiality of the Jet-Engine inspired Wind Turbine operating under low-speed wind environment by mean of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) numerical approach were explored in This study. The main objectives were to develop a reliable numerical model for accessing the capability of the Jet-Engine inspired Wind Turbine and to regulate its performance with influence of curly shroud on the induced flow. The conventional shrouded Wind Turbine has been modified which consist of a stator and a rotor blade covered by curly-shaped shroud adapting the concept of Jet-Engine. A constant wind speed of 5 m/s which was the average wind speed in Malaysia, and tip speed ratio (TSR) varies from 2 to 6 were specified in the simulation. The investigation discovered that the curly-shaped shroud gave an impact to the performance of the Wind Turbine as it can be reviewed from the comparison of the power coefficient on the Jet-Engine inspired Wind Turbine with shroud and without shroud. It was found that the shrouded Wind Turbine improved the power coefficient by 8.6% which was from 0.35 to 0.38. The effect of the curly shroud was also analysed by obtained the velocity and pressure contour from the ANSYS Fluent, where there was a swirl formation at the shroud as the air mixed at different angle, which causes the pressure drop and inlet velocity increased.