Performance analysis of Savonius Rotor for Wave Energy Conversion using CFD

A general purpose viscous flow solver Ansys CFX is used to study a Savonius type wave energy converter in a 3D numerical viscous wave tank. This paper presents the results of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of the effect of blade configuration on the performance of 3 bladed Savonius rotors for wave energy extraction. A piston-type wave generator was incorporated in the computational domain to generate the desired incident waves. A complete OWC system with a 3-bladed Savonius rotor was modeled in a three dimensional numerical wave tank and the hydrodynamic conversion efficiency was estimated. The flow over the rotors is assumed to be two-dimensional (2D), viscous, turbulent and unsteady. The CFX code is used with a solver of the coupled conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy, with an implicit time scheme and with the adoption of the hexahedral mesh and the moving mesh techniques in areas of moving surfaces. Turbulence is modeled with the k.e model. Simulations were carried out simultaneously for the rotor angle and the helical twist. The results indicate that the developed models are suitable to analyze the water flows both in the chamber and in the turbine. For the turbine, the numerical results of torque were compared for all the cases.