Research Projects

Growing global energy demand with modernization of the society, environmental pollution because of hydrocarbon fuels and shortage of fuels create alerts on the society. Majority of researchers accepted solar energy is one of the reliable option to generate electrical energy. Air is the working fluid and Sun is the main source of heat energy to heat the air. Since both (air and sun) are freely available, they can be used to generate electrical power using the proposed setup called solar vortex engine (SVE). Solar updraft tower (SUT) is the plant, the Principal Investigator (PI) already worked and it consists of solar air collector, a canopy part, a chimney and a turbine. The real plant which was constructed in Spain, has 195 m high chimney that was the major drawback in the plant. The PI developed a prototype of SUT with a 6 m tall chimney. The concept and the prototype developed are successful. If the real plant is made, then the outcome of electrical energy can be generated but with the pain of making high chimney. There is a relation between the SUT and SVE plant. The chimney of SUT plant is excluded hence a major problem is avoided and a vortex engine can be added. Such a plant is called SVE plant. The air vortex is created by providing air slots inside a drum. The main objective for this proposal is designing and developing a model for SVE plant. This system consists of an absorber plate, collector cover, vortex engine generator and a turbine. The collector is used to collect the solar radiation. Buoyancy drives the warmer air into the vortex engine generator. A turbine is set in the path of the airflow to convert the kinetic energy of the flowing air into electricity. This is a novel concept which is either in the form of ideas or patents, only a few studies available in specific to SVE. However, there are literatures available on the core concept of creating artificial vortex and maintain its stability. Rigorous computational simulations will be required to analyse its behaviours, stability and optimizations before looking for commercialisation of the concept. The entire setup is planned on the rooftop of a building (from NIT Warangal). The solar collector plates are planned to keep at 30º inclination and spread above the rooftop around 3.5 m diameter to collect more solar energy. At the centre of the panels, a vortex generator engine is provided with the dimension of 0.9 m diameter and 0.6 m height and it is made of Galvanised iron plates. An external bounding structure of 1 m which is made up of polycarbonate sheets and kept above vortex generator engine just to avoid ambient air interaction with created vortex. A turbine is planned to fix above the vortex generator engine to convert kinetic energy of air to electricity. Experiments need to be performed and all the flow and performance parameters need to be estimated after necessary Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.