The Savonius wind turbine is cost-effective, simple in structure, and potentially usable in urban areas but suffers from poor efficiency. Further, vortices emerges downward results in a higher rate of exergy loss and lower wind energy to power conversion rate. Thus, the objective of the present study is to enhance the performance of the Savonius wind turbine and reduction of generated friction entropy considering the novel design of airfoil-shaped blade. For this purpose, nine important design parameters of airfoil-shaped blade were chosen and dozen design points were designed based on the Plackett-burman method. After carrying out the screening analysis, the response surface methodology has been used to conduct sensitivity analysis and investigate the higher-order correlations to discover the optimal design of studied airfoil-shaped blade. The obtained results indicate that the optimal design could augment the power coefficient up to 12.89% at TSR = 0.8, compared to conventional semicircular rotor blade.

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