Environmental issues including ozone layer depletion have become a significant issue because of vanishing natural resources and CO2 emissions according to sustainable use of fossil fuels during industrialization processes. The Vertical Axis Waters Turbine (VAWT) is a device, simple in construction and which gives an appreciable output. Using water resource to produce electricity is a perfect option. But due to complexity of design and initial costs and also absence of a good design for a small scale energy production the small scale water turbines are not used. One of the biggest disadvantage of water turbines is that it needs a dam to be made for the energy production that makes it expensive for the setup and also a lots of skill is required so objective is to make a system so that the conventional dams that are used to generate hydroelectric power can be replaced and hence, the problems with a conventional dam can be solved.
In this project we have proposed a new design for a water turbine which can be used both in small and large scale energy production. The best thing in the proposed design is that it does not need any dam for the setup, it is a water turbine used to trap energy from the surface of the water flow irrespective of the flow of the water stream. This setup of new design can be used between span under the bridges, In the river wherever required kept at a distance where the flow became again laminar from the turbulence cause by the setup in water, surface of SEA and OCEAN as it can be used even in varying direction of flow of water. There are a lots of surface water turbine designs already proposed and used but the main problem in them is that they cannot be adjusted according to the varying water level. In this design we have also proposed a mechanism that can be used for the adjustment the height of the turbine.
The innovation in the vertical axis water turbine is to tilt the blade assembly by a particular angle so that half of the blade assembly that was giving the unwanted drag causing negative torque comes out of the water surface and since the drag in air is much less than the drag in water the efficiency of the vertical axis water turbine can be increased by a significant figure. The limitation of the design is to keep the setup just on the surface of water and a tilting mechanism. In this innovation we have designed the blades in such a way that the blades itself gives a downward force when water flows from the front side of the blade and a upward force when water flows from the back side of the blades, these downward and upward force creates a torque that helps in tilting the blades. Furthermore, a smart mechanism is used for the hub to allow the rotation even after tilting the whole blade assembly. A hydraulically controlled tripod kind of a structure is used to mount the blades on and also to adjust the height of the blades according to the varying water level. The hydraulics are controlled electronically, which senses the height of the water level and accordingly adjusts the height of the turbine automatically. The hydraulics used here don’t need the hydraulic pressure for the whole time as the height of the water surface does not changes too frequently, a locking valve which is again electronically controlled will be used to block the further flow of the hydraulic fluid once the height of the turbine is adjusted, this system will make the hydraulic setup more efficient.
Check my new project