Numerical modeling of turbulent flow around a SAVONIUS wind turbine

Abstract

This thesis presents a numerical modeling of the incompressible and turbulent airflow around a two-bladed Savonius vertical axis wind turbine. The interest of this study is the characterization of the flow downstream of the rotating wind turbine by numerically modeling the generated wake and the power coefficient. The simulation is based on the resolution of Navier Stokes equations in unsteady regime (RANS method) of a flow around a Savonius wind turbine in 2D using the turbulence model komega -SST. The calculations are performed using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code (openFoam) based on the finite volume method , the results are presented by the variation of the coefficients of the aerodynamic forces as a function of time. In the second part the simulation is performed for a flow around a two-bladed savonius wind turbine in rotation, the wake is presented by the distribution of speed and vorticity for different angles with respect to several specific velocities.