Design and analysis of a vertical axis water turbine for river applications using computational fluid dynamics

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Thesis Type: Postgraduate

Institution Of The Thesis: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Turkey

Approval Date: 2014

Student: EREN DEMİRCAN

Co-Supervisor: MEHMET METİN YAVUZ, MEHMET HALUK AKSEL

Abstract:

The main purpose of this study is to design a Darrieus rotor type vertical axis water turbine using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in order to be used in river currents. The CFD modeling is based on two dimensional numerical solution of the rotor motion using commercial Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes solvers, Ansys Fluent and CFX. To validate the two dimensional numerical solution, an experimental Darrieus rotor type water turbine from literature is studied and performance of several turbulence models are examined. A Darrieus rotor type vertical axis water turbine is designed for low speed water currents using QBlade which is an open source sofware used to calculate the performance of the vertical axis turbines. Two dimensional numerical modeling of the designed turbine is performed and results are compared with QBlade results.