Magnetically levitated VAWT with closed loop wind speed conditioning guide vanes

This paper presents a novel magnetically levitated Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) with Omni-directional guide vanes which act as wind concentrator as well as wind shield. Three rotating wind guide vanes/flaps of concave shape are placed on the outer periphery of the turbine. Venturi effect is produced by dynamically changing the angles of the flaps by closed loop control. The vanes protect the turbine from high velocity winds & increase its performance under low velocity winds. There are two modes of guide vanes operation. In the first mode, all the vanes are synchronized and angle of guide vanes is same for all. In the second mode, an additional sensor reads direction of wind and accordingly the system aligns guide vanes individually. A microcontroller based hardware prototype of the turbine has been fabricated and tested for different conditions. The magnetic suspension results in reduced frictional losses. The results obtained validate the advantages of the fabricated turbine as compared to other configurations.