Hydrodynamics Performance Analysis of Vertical Axis Water Turbine (VAWT) Gorlov Type Using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Approach

Abstract

The Renewable Energy conversion technology has been increasingly developed along with the awareness regarding the negative environmental issues caused by Non-renewable Energy waste. Vertical Axis Water Turbine (VAWT) is an interesting research object because of variety of advantages it offers. The Gorlov type VAWT is famous for its tendency to move regardless the water flow directions and able to rotate twice as fast as the inlet velocity. Things which need to consider important related to the turbine hydrodynamic effects including the quantity of blades, hydrofoil profiles, pitch angle, and turbine’s dimension ratio. In this study, numerous variations were applied to determine the hydrodynamic effects caused especially torque output. Investigations were carried out using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. The Gorlov type turbine model is simulated in 3D under steady state flow conditions. The software used to run numerical simulations is ANSYS V18.1. The flow model used is laminar according to secondary data analysis. After the numerical simulation results are obtained, validation is performed with an average error rate of less than 10%. Variations chosen in this study is the pitch angle of 40° and 30 °, the dimension ratio in the form of 450 mm in diameter, the type of asymmetrical hydrofoil (S1210), and the quantity of blades (2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). Simulation results in the form of torque values showed that the best turbine performance is provided by NACA 0012 symmetrical hydrofoil with 40° pitch angle.