Evaluation and CFD Modelling of Flow behind Livestock Ventilation Fan for Small-Scale Wind Power Generation

The objectives of this paper were to evaluate the wind flow behind the livestock ventilation fan for small-scale wind power generation and to make flow profiles of imaginary ventilation fan for future simulation works. The field experiments using typical 50-inch fan indicated that the wind flow behind the ventilation fan had a good possibility of power generation with its high and steady wind speeds up to a distance of 2 m. The expected electricity yield was almost 101~369 W with a small (0.8 m radius) wind turbine. The decline of ventilation fan performance caused by the obstacle was also not significant with about 4 % from a distance of 2 m. The flow profiles for the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was created by combining the direction vectors analyzed from tuft visualization test and the flow predicted by the rotating fan modeling. The flow profiles are expected to provide an efficient saving of computational time and cost to design a better wind turbine system in future works.