Abstract
The intermittent behavior and low wind speed (at sites) are major barriers to wind energy effective harness. Several efforts have been made to overcome these shortcomings; however, ducting or funneling of rotors has been proposed as good technique to achieve improvement over these deficiencies. Latter approach not only improves efficiency, but covers environmental concerns of wind power generators also. For the sites where wind speed is very low and turbulent, vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) remained the better choice. In this study wind accelerating and guiding rotor house (WAG-RH) is introduced to enhance the working range of a VAWT in low wind speed with improved efficiency. The WAG-RH collects the free stream wind parcel, directs and accelerates it towards the useful space left for VAWT to avoid the negative torque and generate more positive torque. In present study, multiple WAG-RH design concepts have been investigated, and favorable results have been achieved in terms of increase in velocity. Nevertheless, final configuration RH(4,45) gives the better performance over all proposed WAG-RH configurations. The numerical simulations are performed using design software Gambit and CFD software ANSYS Fluent 14.5 and compared with experimental results. The comparison of both approaches show good agreement.