Experimental Study of the Performance of the Elliptical Savonius Turbine and New Design for Blade Shape Using A 3D Printing Technology

The main parameter influencing the increase in the performance efficiency of the Savonius wind turbine is the geometry of the blade shape. Therefore, a lot of research has been done on developing and improving this parameter. In this study, a series of numerical tests were performed on the Savonius wind turbine by means of a 2D unsteady simulation (CFD Fluent) to the validation of the experimental results of the elliptical Savonius turbine and also to test different types of turbulence models which are Standard k-ω, (SST) k-ω, Standard k-ε and Realizable k-ε. After that, the new model is developed by changing the internal surface of the concave blade to increase its surface area (wavy shape) and it is experimental tested in the open wind tunnel with wind velocity (6 m/s, 9 m/s) and record the maximum power coefficient was (0.296) with the tip speed ratio (0.72). The new blade design showed a better performance than the classical elliptical Savonius turbine model. Index Term— Savonius rotor; CFD-Fluent; New design for blade shape; Coefficient of power.