CFD Analysis of Savonius VAWT for Household Application

Ramesh K. Kavade; Pravin M. Ghanegaonkar; Sharad Garg

doi:10.37591/joeam.v12i1.5566

Abstract

Fossil fuels are depleting at very fast rate and will have shortages in near future. Also, prices of fuelsincrease day-by-day, demands of renewable energy sources increases for electrical power generation.Wind energy is available in nature free of cost and in abundant form, so is an excellent option forgeneration of electric power through wind turbine technology. Rapid increase in global energyrequirement resulted in considerable attention towards renewable energy sources as there areshortages of fossil fuels. Wind energy is one of the clean and potential renewable energy resources. Itis free of cost and available everywhere abundantly on the earth. VAWT is one of the importantoptions to produce sufficient electricity for household’s application in rural and urban areas as itworks independently irrespective of the direction of wind. Savonius turbine is a vertical axis windturbine which is drag type and characterized as cheaper, simple in construction and can operate atlow speed. This makes it suitable for generating electrical power for household application at ruraland urban areas. This research work contains computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis ofdifferent models of Savonius wind turbines at constant wind speed of 10.5 m/s to determine the poweroutput of the turbine and the effects of various design parameters like blade profile, number of blades,aspect ratio and swept area on the performance of power coefficient (Cp) of the turbine. It was foundfrom CFD analysis that, the power output mainly depends on swept area of the blade and hence fullprofile blade turbine has more power coefficient than the cut blade profile turbine.

Abstract

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