Abstract
In this work, the performance of a new wind turbine design derived from a conventional Savonius turbine is investigated by numerical simulations. The new design consists of three blades without passage between them (closed center). All unsteady computations (which mean computational fluid dynamics as well in the next sections) presented in the current work depend on a commercial software ANSYS Fluent 19. In particular, the blade geometry, the influence of a deflecting plate, and the influence of mobile parts on the returning plate have been investigated in detail. Since first results were partly disappointing for the turbine with a deflector but very interesting for the turbine with an opening blade, these same properties have also been investigated for the classical Savonius turbine. By comparison between both, an optimal solution can emerge from this first study for these designs. The results indicated that the opening blade design improved the performance by 25.9% at λ = 0.7; however, the deflecting plate reduces the performance along the operating range.