Enhancing the Performance of Savonius Wind Turbines with Wind Router

In this study, a square and a rectangular inlet cross-sectional wind router were designed as a performance enhancing mechanism in order to reduce or eliminate the flow on the convex blade rotating against the wind, which causes the low performance of Savonius wind turbines and analyzed numerically using the Ansys Fluent program. With this design, it was attempted to increase the turbine performance by reducing or eliminating the negative torque, which is created in the opposite direction, on the convex side of the blade. For this purpose, the optimum design was attempted to be achieved by changing the positions at certain ratios of the right, left, bottom, and top plates of the wind router assembly placed in front of the turbine. By comparing the numerical data with the experimental data, the accuracy of the numerical analysis method was provided with an average deviation of 5%. It was determined that the power coefficient of 0.15 obtained with the conventional Savonius wind turbine increased to about 0.39 when the inlet cross section of the wind router was square and to about 0.45 when it was rectangular. With the optimum design ratio obtained as a result of this study, the power coefficient of the Savonius wind turbine with wind router was increased by approximately three times compared to the conventional Savonius wind turbine without wind router.