Project Title: Develop Novel and Cost-Effective Way to Generate Renewable Electrical Energy
Project Summary: We have several main assumptions which Aerovec initially asked us to test which represent the company’s important goals. These are as follows:
- It is feasible to place wind turbines on rooftops and mitigate the effects of noise and vibration without making changes to the building.
- Wind turbines which do not implement yaw motion can produce 75% of the power produced by turbines which do implement yaw motion.
- The output airflow from a rooftop HVAC unit can be redirected to the inlet of the wind turbine and boost the turbine annual energy
production (AEP) by 20%, while also offsetting the energy used by the HVAC system by 20%. - The optimum rotor diameter of the rooftop wind turbine is less than 2 m.
Beyond these assumptions, we have expanded the project to improve the design of the wind turbine itself. We are going to use wind tunnel
testing and a small prototype of the Aerovec wind turbine to test several of the above assumptions. Aerovec currently uses a flat airfoil blade
design, so we would like to optimize for blade design using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. Futher, we plan to compile wind data
from airports in various cities to help analyze the ideal yaw motion.
