Wind turbines with aramid fiber composite wind blades for smart cities like urban environments: Numerical simulation study

Abstract

A smart city is an efficient and resilient urban center that, by leveraging its resources, provides its inhabitants with a good standard of living. Many countries worldwide have it as a mission to create citizen-friendly, eco-friendly, and sustainable smart cities. Power generation and power management are also integral parts of this mission. Power generation through renewable energy sources will be a crucial factor in a smart city environment. Renewable energy sources like solar and winds are the most used renewable energy and are more suited for urban applications. The present manuscript focuses on wind power generation using wind turbines in urban environments like smart cities. Most of the urban applications use Vertical axis Wind Turbine (VWT) for power generation. Compared with the Horizontal axis Wind Turbine (HWT), the low efficiency and dynamic instability problems are the main drawbacks of VWT. But the HWT does not have any such issues. Instead, it has its own disadvantages when it is used in smart cities like urban environments. The main shortfalls of conventional HWT are weighing heavily and creating more vibration and acoustic noise. An aramid fiber-based wind blade is proposed in this work to solve the shortcomings of conventional HWT and make it more suited for smart cities such as the urban environment. The CATIA modeling software suite is used to model and design wind blades. To examine the behaviour of the proposed wind turbine, structural, modal, and harmonic analyses are performed using ANSYS. The numerical results indicated that the proposed aramid fiber-based wind turbine is light in weight, creates low acoustic noises, free from vibration, and has a lower chance of resonance occurrence. Thus, it is better suited for urban environments such as smart cities. Graphical abstract