Numerical and Experimental Assessment of influence of the overlap ratio on the performance of domestic wind turbines

Authors

Abstract

Generating Electricity from the renewable resources, especially from wind, within the urban regions, is of much concern for many researchers. The rotor of Savonious has a great potential of electricity generating for the urban regions and domestic applications. In this paper, influence of the Overlap ratio on the performance of the Savonious rotor is investigated. For this purpose, the numerical assessment is done for five Overlap Ratios of 0, 10, 20, 30, and 40%. The height of the rotor is considered 1 meter and its diameter to be 0.7 meter. Numerical simulation is done with CFD commercial package Fluent 6.3 and RNG k-&epsilon model is adopted for the turbulence modeling. The results showed that the best Overlap ratio is the 20% one. On this basis, the experimental model is built with the 20% ratio and its results are compared with the numerical one.

Keywords