Simple Vertical Axis Wind Turbine for Low Wind Speed

Wind energy is one of the potential renewable energy in Indonesia, however low wind speed turbine needs to be designed to adjust for available wind characteristic in the area. Vertical axis wind turbine with Savonius type is suitable for low wind speed application and in this paper turbine design has been optimized aerodynamically using computational fluid dynamics and following raw material size constraint. One-level savonius wind turbine has been designed and compared to previous work of two-lavel wind turbine. Based on CFD simulations, one-level turbine has better performance than the other one. Both wind turbines have large torque at zero RPM which indicates that they are suitable for low wind speed application.