Assessment of Wind Fin Performance Run by Mixed Flows: Experimental and Numerical Investigation

Wind energy considers an important source for a clean power generation. Several problems in the wind-power generation are due to its uncertainty the sudden change in both wind speed rates and direction. Especially, for small wind power generation system, when wind turbines are connected to a small system or isolated grid, the output power fluctuates from time to time. More so, the need for a new wind blade design that works at low air velocities and different direction wind currents requires further investigation. In this work, the numerical and experimental analysis of mixed flows turbine, the possibility of air currents with horizontal and vertical directions on rotating the proposed models was studied. Firstly, two models of a mixed flows turbine were designed and fabricated for experiments. The experiments were conducted to test two important parameters; inlet velocity at 0.8, 1.4, 2.8, and 4.3 m/s, and yaw angles at 45° and 70°, respectively. Secondly, the modeling has been conducted in the environment of CFD, and the turbine system simulation utilized a SST k-ω model to solve and post process the problem. The results can be drawn from the analysis: the characteristics of the mixed flows turbine have the best self-starting and the lower-starting torque as standard for developing the turbine; the starting torque is dependent on the yaw angle for the blade, in which the wind turbine with a large yaw angles for blades is needed to the smaller starting torques; also the output power increased by increasing the wind velocity.