Visualization and analysis of a three-dimensional flow field for understanding output mechanism of twisted Savonius turbines

Abstract

The twisted Savonius turbine is a kind of vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) which have twisted shape, and the output mechanism is still unknown clearly. Many researches show the flow field around the turbine has vertical components along with the rotational axis, and we think this is a key to understand the output mechanism. In order to obtain the three dimensional flow at the wake of the turbine, we applied three dimensional color-PTV and spatio-temporal LER for interpolation of vectors. As a result of these analysis, we found the three dimensional vorticity distribution.