Development of Wind Power Based Micro-Generation Electricity System by Means of Exhaust Fan and its Techno-Economic Evaluation

The growing electrical energy demand and the increasing prices of electricity units worldwide in the past two decades, have stimulated the number of researchers to find and develop alternative energy based generating systems. The harnessing of wind is one of the alternatives and perhaps the oldest methods of generating power that significantly contributes towards the renewable energy production. The household ventilation exhaust fan is a good source of wind energy which is generally used to remove the hot air and humidity in kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms etc. during cooking, bathing and sittings respectively. The exhaust fan provides a constant and consistent high velocity air stream. This work discusses the use of wind turbine to exploit the wastage wind power of an exhaust fan to rotate a micro-wind turbine to produce electricity. Therefore, this paper gives the complete development of a wind power based micro-generation electric system based on an exhaust fan including design layout, mathematical calculation to estimate the available power from an exhaust fan, system description and the hardware implementation to validate its working by considering different parameters and installation factors along with its techno-economic evaluation. The use of the proposed system in Pakistani context is extremely beneficial to store energy for later use and to reduce electricity bills as above 70% people in the country deploy exhaust fans for household ventilation.