Numerical Study of the Hydrodynamic Structure of a Water Savonius Rotor in a Test Section

Turbulent free surface flows are encountered in many hydraulic and water resources engineering problems. their understanding is thus a critical prerequisite for designing stream and river restoration projects and a broad range of hydraulic structures. for this purpose, a volume of fluid (vof) advection algorithm, coupled with the reynolds averaged navier- stokes (rans) equations with a two-equation turbulence closure model, is employed. for efficiently describing and predicting the degree of turbulence in dam-break flows, the computations are carried out with the variation of initial turbulence intensities. from this investigation, it was found that the power performances of a savonius water turbine were changed with the distance between the rotor and the bottom wall of the tunnel and with a rotation direction of the rotor.