Numerical Study of Flow Field on the Combined Blade of Savonius Wind Turbines
Author(s):
Arifin Sanusi*
Affiliation(s):
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Universitas Nusa Cendana, Jalan Adi Sucipto, – Indonesia
Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This research intended to improve the Savonius wind turbine performance by modifying its blade construction. Modification made in this research is to combine a conventional blade as the convex side and an elliptical blade as the concave side into a combined blade. This paper aimed to numerically analyze the flow pattern around the rotor of both the combined and conventional blades as well as the effects of changes in the Reynolds number on the turbine performance. A numerical study was carried out through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) using Ansys_Fluent 14.5. The numerical results of the coefficient of power (Cp) and coefficient of torque (Ct) were verified through the experimental results. Both of them showed an increased performance of the combined blade of the Savonius wind turbine. The combined blade has jet overlap and flow patterns which are greater than the conventional blade. Vortex and recirculation flow at the end of the conventional blade is smaller than that on the combined blade. The increasing Reynolds number on the combined blade showed in the improvement of flow patterns supports the improvement of power coefficient or power (Cp) and coefficient of torque (Ct).