Vertical Axis Bladeless Windmill.

Mechanical Engineering

Today India is having fifth largest installed wind power capacity in the world. As the regions with high wind speed are limited, the installation of conventional windmill is limited. Windmills that would provide safe, quite, simple, affordable and work on lesser wind speeds are need of the hour. Vortex Bladeless is a new concept of wind turbine without blades called Vortex wind turbine. The Bladeless Windmill which works on the phenomenon of vortex shedding to capture the energy produced. Generally, structures are designed to minimize vortex induced vibrations in order to minimize mechanical failures. But here, we try to increase the vibrations in order to convert vortex induced vibrations into electricity. The paper studies the scope and feasibility of the bladeless windmill. The device is composed of a single structural component, simplicity, its manufacturing, transport, storage and installation has clear advantages. It is clear that the proposed device is of prime interest, and that scientific investigation of the response of this wind energy generator under different operation scenarios is highly desirable. Thus, the objective of this SHAPE project is to develop the needed tools to simulate Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) problems and to reproduce the experimental results for scaled models of the Vortex Bladeless device. In order to do so the Alya code, developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, is adapted to perform the Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) problem simulation. The obtained numerical results match satisfactorily with the experimental results reported.

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