Abstract
Today, with the amount of natural fossil fuel getting scarce and the environmental awareness rising, zero-pollution, sustainable and renewable energy has become a global concern. Solar, wind, geothermal, hydraulic, and ocean energies are now the focuses of energy research organizations all over the world, and among the said energies, wind energy is relatively mature. As Taiwan has much potential in developing wind-related technologies, the government has put a lot of efforts in promoting and executing related programs or projects. Compressed air energy storage, one of the ways to store wind energy, has the advantages of stable quality, easy storage, zero pollution, high storage capacity and long storage time and therefore is suited to store wind energy as the power source for air-to-power conversion devices. In recent years, there have been more and more studies of air-to-power conversion devices using compressed air energy storage technology, and the academia has also been interested in the efficiency of air-to-power conversion devices. The purpose of this study is to raise the air-to-power efficiency of the existing 1HP air-to-power device in our laboratory by changing rotor blade design. Instead of spending time and money on processing different rotors and setting up additional experiment instruments, this study focuses on simulation. Through literature review, design modifications of the existing 1HP air-to-power conversion device were thereby drawn, which includes theory analysis, rotor CAD model establishment, housing and runner CAD model establishment, mesh establishment, and turbine rotor CFD simulation. After calculation, the simulation results were used to compare the new design with the existing device, and the performance effects could be concluded. As the results were as expected, all the data could be compiled into a database for future design guidance.