Improving the Performance of Vertical Wind Turbine Using Gears and Timing Belt Mechanism to Reorient the Turbine's Blades

Abstract

Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs) are steadily continued to gain more attention from both academia and governments as they can provide promising solutions for harnessing wind energy in locations with modest wind speeds as well as varying wind directions. In spite of all of the flexibility in working conditions as well as low installation costs and ease of maintenance associated with the VAWTs, their lower efficiency levels significantly obstruct their competiveness in the wind energy field. Therefore, enhancing the performance of such turbines is very critical in exploiting their full potential. Accordingly, this paper proposed a mechanical mechanism which is mainly consists of gears and timing belt that are specially designed to effectively enable the turbine blades to instantaneously reorient themselves to face the wind direction. Also, the proposed turbine is enclosed in a specially designed cage with a rear blade attached to it. This rear blade, as affected by the wind, is responsible for making the cage redirect itself such that its inlet is facing the wind direction. To test the validity of the introduced concept, a VAWT prototype with the proposed mechanism has been manufactured and tested using wind tunnel. The test results demonstrated the self-oriented capability of new design that guaranteed maintaining a continuous perpendicular position between the affecting wind direction and the blade surface. The experimental results also confirmed the expected efficiency improvements and the assessed natural theoretically frequencies ensured that the developed turbine can safely rotate with considerably high angular speeds with no resonance risks.