CFD analysis for H-rotor Darrieus turbine as a low speed wind energy converter

Vertical axis wind turbines like the Darrieus turbine appear to be promising for the conditions of low wind speed, but suffer from a low efficiency compared to horizontal axis turbines. A fully detailed numerical analysis is introduced in this work to improve the global performance of this wind turbine. A comparison between ANSYS Workbench and Gambit meshing tools for the numerical modeling is performed to summarize a final numerical sequence for the Darrieus rotor performance. Then, this model sequence is applied for different blade airfoils to obtain the best performance. Unsteady simulations performed for different speed ratios and based on URANS turbulent calculations using sliding mesh approach. Results show that the accuracy of ANSYS Workbench meshing is improved by using SST K-omega model but it is not recommended for other turbulence models. Moreover, this CFD procedure is used in this paper to assess the turbine performance with different airfoil shapes (25 airfoils). The results introduced new shapes for this turbine with higher efficiency than the regular airfoils by 10%. In addition, blade pitch angle has been studied and the results indicated that the zero pitch angle gives best performance.