Comparative examination on performance of Savonius hydrokinetic turbine in computational modelling and irrigation channels

Renewable energy is the key to a sustainable and environmentally friendly world. Hydropower production has grown in popularity as the most rapidly growing renewable energy source due to its ability to provide green energy. The hydrokinetic turbine is a potential technology that generates electricity from flowing river; this contrasts with traditional hydroelectric technology, which needs enormous dams or reservoirs to provide a sufficiently high head to operate the turbine. Numerous villages in distant places are situated near rivers and streams with very high-water velocity at the mountain bed. Savonius hydrokinetic turbine, due to its simplicity in design have been selected for the study. The purpose of this article is to compare the computational results with the experimental data conducted in laboratory and irrigation channels. The experimental analysis was performed in a channel with flow 0.6 m/s at Reynolds number 1.2 x 105. The maximum value of power coefficient (Cp) was found to be 0.24 at tip speed ratio (TSR) value 0.95 with a blockage ratio of 32%. Numerical simulations are performed using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) programme ANSYS Fluent 19.2. The Unsteady Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) equations are used to solve a three-dimensional SHKT simulation. The findings indicated that the data of computational and the experimental are in good agreement and the error between the values are less than 4%.