Over the years, researches have tried to improve the performance of VAWT. Ogawa et al. [8] examined the effect
of flow deflector plate and found that the rotor power increases nearly 30 percent. Irabu and Roy [9] studied the
effect of surrounding the turbine with a guide box and found increases about 1.5 times with three blades and 1.23
times with two blades greater than that without guide-box tunnel, respectively. Altan et al. [10] found that the
maximum power coefficient of the Savonius wind rotor is increased to about 38.5% with the optimum curtain
arrangement. These studies prove that we can increase the efficiency of a Savonius rotor by using enhancements.
This study builds on top of a previous work carried out by Alam et al. [11] using RMIT Industrial wind tunnel. As
an alternative to existing VAWT systems (e.g., Savonius, Nautilus or Darrieus), a novel concept of Cyclonic Vertical
Axis Wind Turbine (CVAWT) which diverts the incoming wind upward and makes use of the stack effect to extract
more wind power as it exits through a cowling system. Preliminary testing using a card board model of a CVAWT
was carried out by Alam et al [11]. The CVAWT was tested with two configurations over a range of wind speeds (5
to 30 km/h). The first configuration was the bare rotor without a cowling and the other configuration was the bare
rotor shrouded with a cowling. Only the speeds of the rotor with these two configurations were tested and their study
indicated an increase of rotor speed over 130% with the cowling. However, the study neither considered the effect of
the number of blades nor measured the rotor torque and angular velocity which is an important parameter to
determine the possible power generation by a wind turbine. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to measure
the power output of a model CVAWT for four different configurations using better construction material (e.g., fiber
glass) and considering the effect of number of blades.