INVESTIGATING POWER AUGMENTATION OF 1 MW HORIZONTAL AXIS WIND TURBINE USING AUXILIARY TURBINES

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 6-24-2024

Abstract

To contribute to climate change mitigation, the globe is increasingly in need of enhancing the capabilities of renewable energy systems. The great efficiency of wind energy devices is a big challenge for researchers in providing a huge amount of green energy at the lowest cost. This paper presents a numerical study to improve the capture efficiency of a 1 MW horizontal axis wind turbine installation by making the best use of available space employing two extra 100 kW auxiliary turbines. The proposed design concept is based on installing the auxiliary turbines below the primary turbine blade zone on both sides of the tower to catch intruding aerodynamic flow. To solve the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) ANSYS-fluent software was utilized. Initially, a simple numerical model for a 1 MW horizontal axis wind turbine was created to simulate its performance characteristics. Steady-state solution was obtained using the Multi Reference Frame (MRF) approach. The aerodynamic performance of the multi rotor turbine was then investigated using MRF and transient simulation with a sliding mesh approach. The numerical results of both steady and unsteady simulations revealed that the proposed design increased system power output by 12%.

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