Performance of a quarter-pitch twisted Savonius turbine

Abstract

The paper presents Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis of a quarter pitch twisted Savonius turbine. The turbine has been simulated using a CFD software package Flow 3D developed by Flow science. The simulation has been done using Reynold's Averaged Navier-Stokes Equations (RANSE) solver with structured rectangular mesh. The proposed rotor consists of no central shaft and has an overlap ratio of 0.35 with two end plates. Turbine rotates around z axis in the reference plane with six degree of freedom. The turbine is simulated for a constant current speed and a set of variable torques. The simulation result shows that the turbine can achieve more than 7% efficiency and can be used as a marine current turbine.