An Experimental and Numerical Study on Omnidirectional Wind Turbine Prototypes

Omnidirectional wind turbines are versatile in their kind of design such that they can capture wind from multiple directions to generate power. The aim of the present work is to experiment with three prototypes of such turbine rotors at three different wind speeds and to study the results with the computational analysis of such models. The general type of rotor model analysed is cuboctahedron type and the computational fluid flow analysis is performed using ANSYS Fluent software with appropriate boundary conditions to study the velocity variation inside each of them. From the experimental results, it is seen that out of three configurations of the rotor models, the third one has higher power output at different wind speeds. The computational analysis also suggests that this kind of modified rotor types ensure higher power output than conventional HAWT types.