Savonius Wind Turbine Numerical Parametric Analysis Using Space-Filling Design and Gaussian Stochastic Process

Abstract

Wind energy is an alternative source of clean energy to address the growing energy demand and provide pollution-free electricity. With the rapid development of urban areas, high wind energy resources such as high-rise building rooftops are excellent locations for urban wind turbine installation. One of the practical and simple urban wind turbines is the Savonius design. It has a simple design, easy to maintain, and is very affordable. This work focuses on the design evaluation of a Savonius wind turbine (SWT) by varying the rotor diameter, rotor height, and twist angle for urban applications. A transient computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach is applied to assess the various design treatments using a space-filling design of experiments. To address the spaces in the hypercube statistical design, a sphere packing design method was adopted which suited the evaluation of computational simulations results such as that of the CFD. The Gaussian stochastic process model was applied to establish the trend of the parametric performance of the optimized SWT design through the model fitting. The results have shown that optimized SWT performs well with its self-starting capability compared to the traditional Savonius design. In addition, the optimized SWT has shown a better peak power coefficient compared with the results of previous works on the design of SWT.