Study of a Twisted Savonius Water Current Turbine

Savonius Turbine is a drag type device; having good starting torque and operating at low speed. For better performance Savonius turbine has been studied with twist angle along its vertical axis. This work presents Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis as well as experiments on the twisted Savonius turbine. Flow-3D, developed by Flow Science, has been used as a CFD software package. 180 degree twisted Savonius rotor has been proposed, having two end plates and zero overlap ratio. Experiments have been done on the turbine at Flume tank in Marine Institute. CFD results show an efficiency of 12% of the turbine. Experimental results validate the CFD results.