An innovative configuration for new marine current turbine

Abstract

Researchers have shown growing interest in the development of traditional Savonius turbine due to their numerous benefits such as structural simplicity, self-start ability, relatively low operating speed, bi-directional rotational ability and lower environmental impact. However, Savonius turbines exhibits lower efficiency as compared to other similar marine current turbines. This paper proposes a novel design concept for the Savonius turbine. In addition, this work investigates flow and pressure distribution around the buckets of novel rotor with a two-dimensional unsteady numerical model. The proposed marine current turbine with novel design is named as Reza Turbine. Numerical model employed the Dynamic Mesh Method (DMM) for modelling mesh movement around the blades of rotor for different position with respect to computational domain. Developed numerical model solves the unsteady Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations by using SIMPLE algorithm. In addition, we conducted an experiment in a low speed wind tunnel to obtain important performance parameters namely torque, power and performance for the proposed turbine. A set of flow speed were used as inlet boundary condition for both numerical and experimental model. A comparison between numerical and experimental results shows that the SST k-ω turbulence model gives satisfactory results for the developed novel turbine. The developed ReT is showed 52% improvement in efficiency as compared conventional Savonious turbine. Since the peak of power coefficient obtained was 0.321 for ReT, while 0.21 was reported for conventional Savonius turbine.