Polycarbonate Bladed Highway Wind Turbine: A Case Study

In the past decade, the energy demand has increased significantly in line with population rise. This increase is rapidly leading to depletion of conventional resources. Consequently, the leading countries are forced to combine bigger shares of renewable energy (RE) into their energy plans than the ones they already have. This scenario has enlightened some RE technologies such as; Solar Photovoltaic technology (PV), Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), Biomass, and Wind Energy. In the present work, one of the novel applications of wind energy is developed and studied experimentally. The main goal of this new application is to utilize the aerodynamic energy loss generated by moving vehicles; high-speed moving vehicles can produce strong wakes which contain considerable amount of localized wind energy. In the current work, airport road, Amman, Jordan was the selected site for wind energy assessment. A full site assessment including wind velocity, direction, and power content associated with wind speed from moving vehicles was conducted. The proposed system is not only capable of utilizing power from moving vehicles, but is also designed to have a relatively low cut-in wind speed to generated electricity from natural wind. The rotor of the experiment prototype was fully made of Polycarbonate sheets, owing to their light weight and high resilience against fatigue. The design of rotor is the Banki wind turbine, which includes multiple blades to harvest the maximum amount of kinetic energy. In results, the turbine featured a maximum power coefficient of 0.00924 and a cut in wind speed of 6.29 m/s. Furthermore, the turbine features a low starting torque and a rigid structure. These, among many other characteristics, indicated that the proposed system has a good performance in comparison with other configurations of vertical axis wind turbines.