A CFD STUDY OF A SAVONIUS WATER CURRENT TURBINE

Abstract

In earlier work, we tested the Savonius rotor as a water current turbine. Here we explore the possibility of studying the behaviour of the rotor using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software package FLOW 3D. The paper shows that CFD can predict the basic behaviour of the rotor as seen in the experiment. This result is important because running CFD takes much less time and is much less expensive than running experiments. So we can now use CFD to optimize the geometry and explore strategies for control.