DEVELOPMENT OF SAVONIOUS TYPE HYDROKINETIC TURBINE

Abstract

Energy crisis and the effect of conventional energy resources pay a great attention toward the use of renewable energy. The conventional sources of energy are depleting day by day. It is therefore there is a need to use of renewable energy sources. The different renewable energy resources like wind, hydro, solar and biomass can be harnessed in cost effective manner. One of' the best among all the renewable energy sources which is freely available in nature and has vast potential is hydro power. To exploit this large potential of hydro power different turbines are used depending on the basis of site conditions. Basically conventional turbines are suitable for high head and low head sites and are available in standard sizes. However ultra-low head turbines and turbines suitable for zero head (hydro kinetic) are not commercially available. It is therefore, there is a need to develop the standard size turbines suitable for flowing streams. Under the present dissertation, Hydrokinetic turbines are studied. Based on the literature survey, it is found that there is a scope to modify the savonious type turbine. In this work, a multi stage rotor with variable diameter of savonious turbine has been developed and analyzed computationally in order to enhance the performance of savonious rotor. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis has been found an effective tool for predicting the performance of the savonious type hydrokinetic turbine rotor for different design parameter. A CFD based analysis has been carried out for different parameter and the results are compared in order to get the better power coefficient of the rotor. In order to carry out this analysis a model of savonious turbine is developed by considering different system and turbine parameters. Further, the model is tested in the ANSYS 14.0 software in order to find out the performance of the rotor. An attempt has been made to compare the performance of the proposed rotor with a single stage rotor under similar conditions. It has been found that about 9.41% enhancement in power coefficient has been obtained for the similar conditions, which can be considered a substantial enhancement in the performance of the savonious turbine rotor