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5.1 Introduction
ANSYS Fluent is the prominent CFD tool, induced to hold out stream flow analysis and pressure
variation. In this chapter, the fluent analysis is being conducted which gives the velocity and pressure
based solutions for the blades.
Two-dimensional computational domain has been made for the three-blade Savonius rotor. Since the
vertical axis wind turbine is naturally a 2-D device, where the blades rotate in the same plane as the
approaching wind, a two-dimensional simulation is deemed to be adequate for this application.
Figure 5.1: Fluid domain for two blade rotor(Without overlapping blade)
The governing equations are then discretized and solved inside each of these sub domains. The sub
domains are often called elements or cells, and the collection of all elements or cells is called a mesh or
grid.
On the four surrounding edges of the fluid domain, uniform grid spaces were taken. However, uniform
meshing was done on the blades. The density of mesh is high near the blades peripheries tips, and it
decreases away from the rotor. This was done to capture the separated rotor wakes. Each mesh element
is considered as a control volume. All dependent variables are calculated at the centroid of the control
volumes. Uniform (course) meshing was done on the face external to the rotor as shown in figure .
The number of total elements generated during mesh is 194980 and number of nodes generated during
mesh modelling of savonius rotor is 196312 the smoothing of mesh is medium and max face size is equal to
1.00 e-0003 as shown in figure.
ANSYS Fluent is a powerful and flexible general-purpose computational fluid dynamics software
package used to model flow, turbulence, heat transfer, and reactions for industrial applications. The
physical models allow accurate CFD analysis for a wide range of fluids problems - from airflow over an
aircraft wing to combustion in a furnace.
In the CFD analysis, there are two approach to solve the problem
1. Pressure based approach: In the pressure based approached the pressure field is extracted by
solving a pressure or pressure correction equation which is obtained by manipulating continuity
and momentum equation.
2. Density based approach: In the density based approach, the continuity equation is used to obtain
the density field while the pressure field is determine from the equation of state.
The pressure based approach was developed for low speed incompressible flow while density based
approach was mainly used for high speed compressible flows. So in this fluent solution pressure based
approach is use as shown in figure because flow is incompressible and velocity is also 3m/s.
1. Mass is conserved
3. Energy is conserved
The simplest and the most widely use two equation turbulence model is the standard K-s model that
can solved two separate transport equation to allow the turbulent kinetic energy and its dissipation rate to
independently determined. The first transported variable is turbulent kinetic energy, k. The second
transported variable in this case is the turbulent dissipation, s. It is the variable that determines the scale
of the turbulence, whereas the first variable, k, determines the energy in the turbulence.
The contour plot analysis gives an idea about the flow physics of a wind rotor and its power production
mechanism. Relative velocity magnitude (velocity of the rotor relative to wind) and static pressure
contours of the Savonius rotor are analysed.
In this section results from CFD fluent analysis is discuss and this results is compare with the
theoretical results. Static torque of rotor and force on the rotor by wind is found at the end of CFD
fluent.From this results, three blade rotor is selected which gives better performance than two blade
rotor. The following value is discuss below in brief.
The mesh system of the BAWT is divided by two parts. One is a rotational mesh and the
other is a stationary mesh system. The rotational region mesh system, including the rotor with
blades. Hexahedral mesh is used for the convergence and precise aerodynamic power output
calculations. The mesh density of the rotational region is much higher than that of the stationary
region for a more precise power output calculation. The rotational direction of the rotor is
clockwise and the rotational phase of each wind turbine is synchronized.
Permanent-Magnet DC Generator :
Permanent-magnet DC machines are widely found in a wide variety of low-power
applications. The field winding is replaced by a permanent magnet, resulting in simpler
construction. Chief among these is that they do not require external excitation and its associated
power dissipation to create magnetic fields in the machine the space required for the permanent
magnets may be less than that required for the field winding, and this machine may be smaller,
and in some cases cheaper, than their externally excited counterparts. The rotor of this machine
consists of a conventional DC armature with commutator segments and brushes. The interaction
between the axial current carrying rotor conductors and the magnetic flux produced by the
permanent magnet results in the generation of the torque.