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.