Date

2015-3

Author

Mohiuddin, Abdullah

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This thesis investigates power generation opportunities by considering computational analysis of an experimental setup which is initially proposed to mimic dust devils in a controlled environment. The concept relies on buoyancy effect over a heated plate surrounded by vertical thin plates or vanes. Once the heated air starts rising, vertical vanes help surrounding air to flow inwards in a direction tangential to the vortex core to introduce swirl to the flow. Present study focuses on the computational fluid dynamics based analysis of a meter scale experimental setup using OpenFOAM. First, the developed model is validated against experimental data available in the literature and theoretical models developed for naturally occurring dust devils. The novelty of the thesis is that it is the first parametric study that investigates the effects of the number of vanes, vane angles, vane height, vane width, on axial volumetric flow rate profiles of the experimental setup. It is found that axial flow rate increases with vane height, while there exists an optimal vane width and vane spacing to enhance axial flow rate. It is also found that an increase in vane angles only from 25º to 40º improves the mass flow rate while reducing below 25º or increasing above 40º does not change the mass flow rate significantly. On the other, amount of swirl is found to increase continuously with the vane angle which suggests that various turbine blade geometries can be considered to optimize power harvesting opportunities.

Subject Keywords

Renewable Energy, Dust Devils, Natural Convection, Solar Vortex

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/69832

Collections

Northern Cyprus Campus, Thesis