Abstract
The Savonius wind rotor, a drag-based vertical-axis wind turbine, is gaining importance throughout the globe as a way to generate electricity while reducing global warming. Although it exhibits a lower performance, this type of rotor is gaining immense interest in the research community because of its straightforward design, self-starting capability, and operational ease. Over the past two decades, numerous blade profiles have been created to improve the performance of this rotor. A recently developed arc-elliptical blade profile has shown an improved performance characteristic. In the present computational study, this arc-elliptical blade profile is considered with a concentrated augmenter placed in front of it. The concentrated augmenter is placed to enhance the performance of the blade profile further. The arc-elliptical blade profile with the concentrated augmenter is investigated using a commercial computational fluid dynamic solver ANSYS Fluent 17.1 with the help of shear stress transport (SST) k-ω turbulence model. The torque and power coefficients of the augmented rotor have been evaluated for a range of tip-speed ratio. The results obtained in the present study are also compared with those of the arc-elliptical blade profile without the concentrators. An enhancement of CPmax by 4.11% is observed in the arc-elliptical bladed rotor with the concentrated augmenter as compared to the one without the augmenter.
