Design and Fabrication of VAWT with MagLev

Amidst the decades old energy crisis that plagues Pakistan, we as engineers must turn to energy solutions which may help alleviate some of the problems caused by this crisis. Since fossil fuel is ultimately expendable and comes with a myriad of problems, the focus must be directed toward renewable a

Project Title

Design and Fabrication of VAWT with MagLev

Project Area of Specialization

Mechanical Engineering

Project Summary

Amidst the decades old energy crisis that plagues Pakistan, we as engineers must turn to energy solutions which may help alleviate some of the problems caused by this crisis. Since fossil fuel is ultimately expendable and comes with a myriad of problems, the focus must be directed toward renewable and sustainable energy sources. One such energy source which is massively overlooked and under-developed is Wind Energy. Our project which is a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine is based on the usage of the kinetic energy of wind to generate electricity. We aim to work on the various designs (Savonius and the H-Darius turbine) of VAWT and run the static and dynamic analysis to select the best design which is suitable for the working conditions of urban areas.

Project Objectives

Amidst the decades old energy crisis that plagues Pakistan, we as engineers must turn to energy solutions which may help alleviate some of the problems caused by this crisis. Since fossil fuel is ultimately expendable and comes with a myriad of problems, the focus must be directed toward renewable and sustainable energy sources. One such energy source which is massively overlooked and under-developed is Wind Energy. Our project which is a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine is based on the usage of the kinetic energy of wind to generate electricity. We aim to work on the various designs (Savonius and the H-Darius turbine) of VAWT and run the static and dynamic analysis to select the best design which is suitable for the working conditions of urban areas.

Project Implementation Method

Our concept of design is to create a VAWT which is easy to build and cost effective for use in urban areas. The selection of the type of VAWT will be done accordingly. We shall use our literature review to design a VAWT which has more research available in order to combine all the favourable conclusions derived by the authors and create a novel and efficient design for urban use. We aim to eliminate the gearbox system and replace it with a direct drive permanent magnet generator in order to reduce the friction and thus decrease the resisting torque of the system in order to make the design more efficient and have lesser moving parts so that maintenance is very simplified. The direct drive generator will consist of a stator with permanent magnets and copper wire coils and a rotor with permanent magnets. The changing magnetic flux due to rotation will induce an alternating electric current in the coils thus generating electricity. The stator will comprise of Magnet Coil Pairs and the rotor will have the Magnets in the corresponding positions. The rotor and stator will be suspended by Magnetic Levitation which will complete the Maglev Direct Drive System.

Benefits of the Project

With the efficient and novel design created by using the literature review and experimentation we aim to introduce an alternate way of producing the electricity by utilizing the renewable energy in a small scale for urban areas of Pakistan, which would ultimately reduce the burden on our main electricity supply.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

We found out in our literature review that the greater the number of blades the lesser the TSR at which our optimum Cp will occur. However, increasing the blades also lowers the peak Cp. Therefore, we reach a compromise by using 3 blades,This will also decrease the weight of our rotary components and lessen drag. The solidity of the turbine has an impact on the self-starting capabilities of the VAWT and also on the efficiency of the turbine. The greater the solidity the greater the starting torque produced and the lower the efficiency of the turbine.

The output scheme for our VAWT will be one where we charge a battery bank for various uses. We will have to rectify the raw AC output from the direct drive generator and we will do this by using an uncontrolled full wave bridge rectifier. When the turbine starts revolving, the cut-in voltage Vcut-in must equal the battery voltage Vbatt. We need to work within a certain voltage range so we will add an over-voltage protection device which will be a dump load resistor to consume the extra voltage. We will be employing a 3Phase Star Connection to link the coils in the generator. These 3 phases will then be rectified by the rectifier and give us a constant DC output which will charge the battery.

Final Deliverable of the Project

Hardware System

Core Industry

Energy

Other Industries

Manufacturing

Core Technology

Clean Tech

Other Technologies

Others

Sustainable Development Goals

Affordable and Clean Energy

Required Resources

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