Background and Objective: With the increment of population, the need for sustainable energy development has been raised. By increasing greenhouse gas emissions and decreasing the fossil energy reserves have also shifted research centers around the world to renewable ene More
Background and Objective: With the increment of population, the need for sustainable energy development has been raised. By increasing greenhouse gas emissions and decreasing the fossil energy reserves have also shifted research centers around the world to renewable energy sources. Among renewable energies, wind energy is one of the most important types of renewable energy. In this study, the efficiency of the Savonius wind turbine is significantly increased by using an airfoil-shaped deflector. This increase in efficiency is carried out by upgrading the self-starting performance capability of the Savonius wind turbine and reducing the negative torque generated by the returning blade.
Material and Methodology: Different configurations of the proposed deflector system are considered numerically using the CFD solver. A three-dimensional incompressible unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes simulation in conjunction with the SST k-ω turbulence model is done and validated with the available experimental data.
Findings: The predicted results indicated that the performance of the Savonius rotor is highly dependent on the position and angle of the deflector. Thus, there was an appropriate position and angle values to obtain the highest torque and power coefficients. It was concluded that using the favorable airfoil-shaped deflector significantly enhanced the static torque coefficient values in all angular ranges especially in the rotation angles between 0° to 30° and 150° to 180°. By properly covering the returning blade using the airfoil-shaped deflector, the static torque coefficient values increased up to 2 times higher than that generated by without deflector case.
Discussion and Conclusion: The Savonius turbine suffers from poor efficiency. Hence, the present work dealt with proposing an improved deflector system led to generate higher power and torque coefficients which resulted in capturing a higher efficiency and better self-starting capability.
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