A New Building-Integrated Wind Turbine System Utilizing the Building

Abstract

This paper proposes an innovative building-integrated wind turbine (BIWT) system by directly utilizing the building skin, which is an unused and unavailable area in all conventional BIWT systems. The proposed system has been developed by combining a guide vane that is able to effectively collect the incoming wind and increase its speed and a rotor with an appropriate shape for specific conditions. To this end, several important design issues for the guide vane as well as the rotor were thoroughly investigated and accordingly addressed in this paper. A series of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses was performed to determine the optimal configuration of the proposed system. Finally, it is demonstrated from performance evaluation tests that the prototype with the specially designed guide vane and rotor for the proposed BIWT system accelerates the wind speed to a sufficient level and consequently increases the power coefficient significantly. Thus, it was confirmed that the proposed system is a promising environment-friendly energy production system for urban areas.