Design Features and Numerical Investigation of Counter-Rotating VAWT with Co-Axial Rotors Displaced from Each Other along the Axis of Rotation

Ihor Shchur (), Volodymyr Klymko, Shengbai Xie and David Schmidt ()
Additional contact information
Ihor Shchur: Department of Electric Mechatronics and Computerized Electromechanical Systems, Lviv Polytechnic National University, 79013 Lviv, Ukraine
Volodymyr Klymko: Emerson Automation Solutions, 79071 Lviv, Ukraine
Shengbai Xie: Convergent Science Inc., Madison, WI 53719, USA
David Schmidt: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 11, 1-24

Abstract: In this paper, dual-rotor counter-rotating (CR) configurations of vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) are briefly inspected and divided into three types. This investigation was focused on one of these types—the CR-VAWT with co-axial rotors, in which two equal rotors are placed on the same shaft, displaced from each other along it and rotated in opposite directions. For this CR-VAWT with three-blade H-Darrieus rotors, the properties of the design in terms of aerodynamics, mechanical transmission and electric generator, as well as control system, are analyzed. A new direct-driven dual-rotor permanent magnet synchronous generator was proposed, in which two built-in low-power PM electric machines have been added. They perform two functions—starting-up and overclocking of the rotors to the angular velocity at which the lifting force of the blades is generated, and stabilizing the CR-VAWT work as wind gusts act on the two rotors. Detailed in this paper is the evaluation of the aerodynamic performance of the CR-VAWT via 3D computational fluid dynamics simulations. The evaluation was conducted using the CONVERGE CFD software with the inclusion of the actuator line model for the rotor aerodynamics, which significantly reduces the computational effort. Obtained results show that both rotors, while they rotate in opposite directions, had a positive impact on each other. At the optimal distance between the rotors of 0.3 from a rotor height, the power coefficients of the upper and lower rotors in the CR-VAWT increased, respectively, by 5.5% and 13.3% simultaneously with some increase in their optimal tip-speed ratio compared to the single-rotor VAWT.

Keywords: vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT); dual-rotor wind turbine; counter-rotating wind turbine; dual-rotor permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSM); control system; computational fluid dynamics (CFD); actuator line modeling (ALM) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/11/4493/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/11/4493/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:16:y:2023:i:11:p:4493-:d:1162570

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().