Numerical and experimental characterization of multi-stage Savonius rotors

In this paper, numerical simulation and experimental validation were performed to study the effect of multi-stage on the performance of a Savonius rotor. We tested five configurations with different stage number and we were particularly interested in visualizing the velocity field, the static pressure, the dynamic pressure, the vorticity, the turbulent kinetic energy, the turbulent dissipation rate and the turbulent viscosity. The software “SolidWorks Flow Simulation” has been used to present the local characteristics in different transverse and longitudinal planes. The considered numerical model is based on the resolution of the Navier-Stokes equations in conjunction with the standard k-ε turbulence model. These equations were solved by a finite volume discretization method. The wind tunnel experiment results were compared to the numerical results in terms of velocity profile, dynamic torque coefficient and power coefficient.