Wind Harnessing Technology

The objective: rethink energy recovery in high-airflow, constrained environments. The radiator fan in a typical automotive cooling system pushes a continuous, turbulent volume of air, most of which dissipates as heat without recovering useful work.

By replacing the conventional fan with a small-scale, high-speed wind turbine sized for the cooling pack, parasitic losses can be captured as electrical output. The challenge: precisely tune blade profiles to operate efficiently inside a turbulent wake region without impeding the cooling airflow the engine still needs.

The work involved iterative blade-geometry studies in SolidWorks, paired with ANSYS CFD characterization of pressure, velocity, and angle-of-attack across the operating envelope.