Studying Four Different Permanent Magnet Eddy Currents Heaters with Different Magnet Areas and Numbers to Produce Heat Directly from a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

Abstract

Changing the magnetic field on a conductor metal can induce eddy currents, which cause heat generation. In this paper, we use this idea to convert wind energy into thermal energy directly. This system contains a vertical axis wind turbine and an eddy currents heat generator. The eddy currents heat generator has two parts. The first part is a rotor with some permanent magnets causing the magnetic field changes, and the second part is a stator that acts as a conductor. The magnetic field changes in the heat generator play an important role in power output; therefore, we test four different magnet arrangements with different pole numbers on the rotor at different rotational speeds from 100 rpm to 500 rpm to measure the input torque and power needed to rotate each model. Then, based on the measured data, the wind turbine is designed by Qblade software based on the blade element momentum theory. It is shown that compared to the weight of the heat generator and the area of magnetization, designing a proper magnet arrangement for the heat generator can change the output power considerably as it can trigger the magnetic field fluctuation along the direction of rotation. For example, opting for a proper arrangement on the rotor decreases the number of poles from 120 to 24 but increases the power input from 223 W to 1357 W.