Vertical axis wind turbines have potential advantages for small domestic applications, as they
can be effectively used in urban areas where wind is intermittently unsteady and turbulent.
This work highlights the progress made in the development of aerodynamic models for
predicting the performance of straight-bladed, fixed-pitch vertical axis wind turbine blade
profiles. An improved low-fidelity blade element momentum algorithm using a hybrid
database is built to investigate the solidity of the turbine, by analyzing the effect of blade
chord, radius, and number blades at different tip speed ratios. This is followed by a 2-D
numerical investigation to compare the performance prediction capability of the CFD and
mathematical model. Both high- and low-fidelity analyses have shown minimum/negative
performance at low tip speed ratio, indicating the general inability of the fixed pitch vertical
axis turbine to self-start. The CFD analysis, although is computationally intensive, has shown
better performance than the analytical solution and also captures important flow features,
such as vortex shedding among other detailed flow field features.