Design and Analysis of a Combined Savonius-Darrieus Wind Turbine for Irrigation Application

Renewable energies as a clean replacement resource of fossil fuels have many advantages, among which wind has the potential to be the very applicable source in the world. To use wind energy, two kinds of turbines have been developed; the Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) and Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT). In small scale applications, using a VAWT has some advantages such as low cost and noise, simple mechanism, and the low sensitivity to the wind direction. In this paper, the design and analysis of a combined wind turbine, consist of the Savonius-Darrieus rotor, are performed to use in irrigation applications. To predict the output power, a series of experiments were conducted using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method. For this purpose, ANSYS fluent and Q-Blade software programs are used. To design the rotor performance, NACA symmetric airfoils are considered. Next, this combined turbine was made and experimental tests were performed. Finally, the output power is computed and so, the water flow rate for irrigation purposes such as water pumping is obtained. The results indicate that the self-starting of the turbine is improved using the considered design. This could be useful in regions with low wind speed.