Numerical Simulations of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine with Controllable Blades

Wind power gives us non-polluting alternative to reduce the exploration of conventional fossil fuels.A novel vertical axis wind turbine(VAWT) has been developed that consists of several controllable plat blades.A computational investigation of the output characteristics of the VAWT has been conducted using the commercial computational fluid dynamics(CFD) code ANSYS 13.0.A validation study was performed using a Savonius turbine and good agreement is obtained with experimental data.Both fixed and rotating two-dimensional CFD simulations are conducted to further investigate the performance of the VAWT.Steady simulations have demonstrated that the VAWT has good self-starting ability with an averaged static torque coefficient of 1.09.The predicted maximum averaged power coefficient is 0.449,which is nearly 2 times of the Savonius turbine.