Study of Vertical Axis Turbines

This paper establishes the methodology to numerically study the vertical axis wind turbine. This procedure is easily applied to water turbines to extract energy from water currents in rivers and seas. The interest of this kind of turbines is based on the low manufacture cost, easy maintenance and can operate with low fluid velocities. The only different between wind and water turbines are the solidity parameter. Computational Fluid Dynamics is an essential tool to model the performance of fluid systems in a previous step to the experimental study. The paper shows the numerical model, the post-process of results to obtain the characteristic curves of the performance of turbines as well as design tendencies when changing solidity. A collateral application could be the calibration of spinning anemometers to measure streams flows. The study of the follow patterns will gain an insight about the performance of the devices.