Backward-facing steps are commonly formed on wings and blades due to misalignment between segments or the addition of protective films. A backward-facing step (BFS) is known to degrade the airfoil performance. To mitigate these adverse effects, a three-dimensional low-profile serrated pattern (termed sBFS) was applied downstream of a BFS on an LA203A profile airfoil. The model drag was determined from wake surveys using a traversing Pitot-static probe within a subsonic wind tunnel operating at a chord-based Reynolds number of 300,000. The airfoil spanned the wind tunnel width (914 mm) and had a 197 mm chord length. Four different sBFS configurations were tested, each formed by applying a 1 mm thick film around the model leading edge. In addition, a BFS at various chord locations and a clean wing (i.e., no film applied) were tested for reference. The sBFS was able to reduce the drag relative the BFS by up to 8–10%, though not outperforming the clean wing configuration. In addition, the wake surveys showed the sBFS produced strong coherent structures that persist into the far-wake region (five chord length downstream of the model) with a scale that was much larger than the step height. Additionally, a computational study was carried out to further examine the flow behavior on the airfoil that produced the coherent structures. This showed that fluid near the surface gets entrained towards the sBFS downstream tip of the sBFS, which creates the initial rotation of these coherent structures that persist into the far-wake region.

Savonius vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) typically suffer from low efficiency due to detrimental drag production during one half of the rotational cycle. The present study examines a stator assembly created with the objective of trapping cylindrical flow for application in a Savonius VAWT. While stator assemblies have been studied in situ around Savonius rotors in the past, they have never been isolated from the rotor to determine the physics of the flow field, raising the likelihood that a moving rotor could cover up deficiencies attributable to the stator design. The flow field created by a stator assembly, sans rotor, is studied computationally using three-dimensional (3D) numerical simulations in the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package Star-CCM+. Examination of the velocity and pressure contours at the central stator plane shows that the maximum induced velocity exceeded the freestream velocity by 65%. However, flow is not sufficiently trapped in the stator assembly, with excess leakage occurring between the stator blades due to adverse pressure gradients and momentum loss from induced vorticity. A parametric study was conducted on the effect of the number of stator blades with simulations conducted with 6, 12, and 24 blades. Reducing the blade number resulted in a reduction in the cohesiveness of the internal swirling flow structure and increased the leakage of flow through the stator. Two unique energy loss mechanisms have been identified with both caused by adverse pressure gradients induced by the stator.