Unsteady Simulation of a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

In the present study, an unsteady computational investigation has been carried out in order to analyze the performance of a single-stage vertical axis wind turbine using ANSYS Fluent 6.3 software package and the results obtained are validated with the experimental data. A Realizable k-ε turbulence model with enhanced wall functions has been used to analyze a three dimensional model of this turbine. The data and boundary conditions for this analysis have been taken from the experimental observations. The experiments have been carried out under various load conditions to find the power and torque coefficients. The outcomes of numerical simulation and experiments are compared, analyzed and are found analogous with the data available in open literature.