EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF A SAVONIUS- DARRIEUS WIND MACHINE

In this paper, experimental investigations were carried out to study the performance of a Savonius rotor as well as a Savonius- Darrieus machine. For this purpose, two types of models, one Savonius rotor and the other Savonius- Darrieus machine were designed and fabricated. The Savonius rotor was a two- bladed system having 8 cm bucket diameter and 20 cm in height with provision for overlap variation. For the Savonius- Darrieus machine, in the upper part, there was a two-bladed Savonius rotor having bucket diameter of 8 cm and height of 10 cm and in the lower side, there was Darrieus machine having three curved blades of dimension of 10 cm in height and 4 cm in radius. The overlap variation was made in the upper part. These were tested in a subsonic wind tunnel and it was observed that there was an improvement in the power coefficient for Savonius- Darrieus machine compared to only Savonius rotor under the same test conditions.