Kyriakos Charalabous, "Parametric geometrical modeling of a diffuser augmented wind turbine", Master Thesis, School of Production Engineering and Management, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2017
https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.69003
The development and application of renewable energy has become an important issue in recent years due to the serious effects of global warming and the inevitable reduction of the fossil fuel deposits. Driven by an increasingly energy hungry world and a push towards sustainable and environmentally friendly energy sources, the wind energy is currently one of the most rapidly growing industries. Current designs, such as conventional horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWTs) require expansive designs geometrically rather than aerodynamically augmented. Therefore, it is necessary to develop innovative wind capturing devices that can produce energy in the locations where large HAWTs are impractical to be installed. The Diffuser Augmented Wind Turbine (DAWT) is one of the innovative wind energy conversion systems that have been investigated over the last decades, to decrease the cost of wind energy harvesting and provide a sustainable solution for small scale energy production in site-specific cases. DAWTs enhance the power output of the rotor by increasing the speed of the approaching wind, through the employment of a static shroud. Therefore, a simple and quick design tool is necessary for designers to develop efficient wind energy conversion systems. This work presents a methodology for the parametric design of a Diffuser Augmented Wind Turbine, developed in Grasshopper®, a graphical algorithm editor tightly integrated into Rhinoceros 3D CAD application. The geometric algorithm gives the user the ability to design the main parts composing a complete DAWT system, including the turbine blades, the centrebody, the diffuser geometry, as well as the internal flap, the tower and the central column structures. The developed algorithm eventually produces compound solid DAWTs, which can be further imported to mesh generation and analysis programs through standard geometry exchange protocols, for cooperation with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Computational Structural Dynamics (CSD) solvers. To this end, a simplified DAWT design, produced by the proposed design methodology, is used to produce hybrid unstructured mesh, to be used for CFD analysis of the flow through the DAWT (with a rotating rotor). This mesh generation is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the design process.