A novel technique to enhance the wind power generation in moderate wind speed

Wind energy conversion is considered as the largest capacity installed these days. Wind power is a growing need. It's a free energy resource and environmentally clean. Therefore the need is to harvest and to capture more power from the wind required by developing innovative techniques to enhance system efficiency, especially in low wind area. The research is aimed to increase wind turbine performance by increasing the main rotor speed in low winds speed. It is proposed that attaching Tip-fan to each main rotor blade tip, where the Tip-fan creates a tangential force in order to build initial torque and to extract the maximum possible power. The use of rotor Tip-fan for enhancing both power conversion as well as low wind speed operation was investigated. It is proposed that Tip-fans operating in the tangential direction create a tangential force that enhances the aerodynamic lift force. It is important that wind turbine starts rotating at the lowest possible wind speed in order to capture more power from wind. Two small prototypes have been successfully built and tested. Initial experiments were carried out in the New Mexico state University wind tunnel to investigate the effect of Tip-fan on the turbine performance. A promising result was found during wind tunnel experiments, where it was seen that more net power was extracted from the wind when Tip-fans were ON than when Tip-fans were OFF. It is concluded that wind turbine performance is greatly affected by Tip-fan. Further the present experiment results suggest that the performance of the proposed system is considerably greater than that of a bare wind turbine. In this research, an analytical approximation and nonlinear function was used to estimate the net power generated and model the experiment data. The research extends the scope of work in green power generation by developing a new technique that will harvest more wind's power. The research benefits the green energy market by encouraging additional investment in wind power generation.