Design And Analysis of Wind Turbine Diffuser Shroud

To fulfill the energy need and face the upcoming energy crisis, there is a need for researching new and innovative systems. Thus to improve the efficiency of wind turbines for the areas having low wind velocities in India, the Shrouding (diffuser augmented) for small wind turbines has been shown to be an effective way to potentially improve the efficiency of small wind turbines for applications in built environments. The degree of the performance improvement depends on several factors including the diffuser shape and geometries, blade airfoils, and the wind condition at the mounting site. The effect of diffuser shape and geometries is reported in this work. Performance of the diffuser investigated with straight diffuser, nozzle-diffuser combination and flanged diffuser. This work aims to investigate the effect of wind velocity on various diffuser shapes and the diffuser geometrical parameters: diffuser lengths (L/D = 0.75 to 1.25) and flange heights (H/D = 0 to 0.25). Various diffuser designs are developed in Creo and simulated in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for low wind velocity. The diffuser shroud improves the performance by 60% as compared to the turbine without shroud and with the nozzle-diffuser with flange 72.5% which is slightly better than diffuser only.