Assessment of IRWES aerodynamics using CFD

IRWES is a novel wind energy system and Ibis Power is planning to use it to cover the electricity needs of the urban areas. In recent years, the team of Ibis Power has been working on designing and testing the performance of this system, so that the principles under this concept can be proved to work as predicted. Specifically, the Ibis Power team has been using the Venturi effect, which is the principle behind the predicted increase in performance of IRWES, to achieve wind acceleration by confining the air-mass coming through the overall system. The testing did not include a wind turbine and therefore the effects that the wind turbine blades introduce to the airflow pattern and finally the efficiency of the turbine. The main purpose of this report is to design a valid and optimal vertical axis wind turbine and explore the overall efficiency of the full system, by means of numerical modelling, and specifically Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. At the same time, a detailed step by step CFD methodology will be described and provided, so that Ibis Power can conduct future research faster and more efficiently. Additionally, several parametric simulations need to be conducted without the presence of the Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT), in order to observe whether and how IRWES performs if basic design characteristics are modified. In this way we have been able to determine some design guidelines that Ibis Power can follow for aerodynamic product optimization.