A Review on Small-Scale Building Integrated-Wind Energy Harvesting Systems (Bi-WEHS) for Rural and Decentralised Communities

Activity: Talk or presentation typesOral presentation

Description

The ‘conventional’ approach to harvesting energy from wind flows on the surfaces of buildings consist of deploying horizontal or vertical axis wind turbines. However, adopting these conventional wind turbines in rural communities located at the equatorial regions have certain limitations. This includes low power output in equatorial belt areas where wind velocities are expected to be low. Moreover, placing a heavy conventional wind turbine on a lightweight building structure can negatively impact on the integrity of the structure. Lastly, the conventional wind turbines are expected to have low longevity due to nature of the transient loads and vibrations that these technologies are subjected to during operations. In this study, the power and harvesting performance of different types of wind energy harvesting systems were investigated. The technologies investigated include oscillating mechanism such as galloping, flutter, vortex induced vibration systems to harvest energy from the wind. This is to provide an alternative clean energy solution for increasing autonomous power in off-grid communities located within the equatorial belt. This review focused on the application of a lightweight building integrated wind energy harvesting system with a longer lifespan which is designed to operate within and capture energy within the accelerated air flow from the roof of the building structures. The reviewed studies identified the technical features of each wind induced vibration technology and determined whether the energy harvester can work under non-uniform wind flow and wide range of wind speed, which can potentially be experienced by the energy harvester when is installed into the roof. From the studied literature, it showed that the small-scale wind energy harvester device achieved a power output of 8.4 mW at 2.5 m/s. of. However, the power output can still be improved by installing the energy harvester on roof building structure which can create wind velocity acceleration, increasing the scale of the harvester, and addition of power management. It was observed that although there are numerous studies on small scale energy harvesting devices, its integration with structures and buildings was rarely studied and should be the focus of future research.
Period22 May 202226 May 2022
Event title5th SEE SDEWES Conference
Event typeConference
Conference number5th
LocationVlorë, AlbaniaShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational