Undulatory Shape Distributed along the Concave Surface of Savonius Wind Turbine Blade Inspired by the Flower of Life Concept

Abstract

This research aimed to quantitatively investigate the impact of a novel approach, known as the undulatory form inspired by the flower of life concept, on the performance of conventional Savonius Wind Turbine (SWT). This approach entails the replacement of the conventional SWT's concave surface with a series of small blades, distributed in both convex and concave positions, arranged in an undulating pattern along the surface. Four models have been tested (MODEL22, MODEL30, MODEL60 and MODEL80) in an attempt to verify the effectiveness of this new method in enhancing wind turbine power coefficient. We use ANSYS Fluent software to solve the Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) and the SST k-omega turbulence model equations. The experimental and numerical data supported the innovative methodology, which was meant to show how it could increase the wind turbine's power coefficient in a tip speed ratio (TSR) range of 0.5 to 1.2 while keeping a 15% overlap ratio (OR) relative to the rotor diameter and an inlet velocity of 7 m/s with a R_e=4.43×〖10〗^5. We conducted a comparison between our innovative model and the experimental and numerical studies and found that the undulatory shape significantly improved the power coefficient. MODEL60 was the optimal model, showing an improvement of 17.34% at TSR = 0.7 compared to a wavy-form numerical study and 6.25% at TSR = 1 compared to the experimental study.