I have been working on creating a spherical lift-based turbine, based on the Lucid Energy turbine, for the past few weeks. As the water flows through the pipe, the water rotates the turbine perpendicular to the flow. My goal is to find the rotational speed of the turbine due to the flow.

I had a lot of trouble creating it but I now have a turbine that closely resembles the original, using NACA-0020 airfoils as the turbine blades.

However now that I have everything designed, I cannot get Flow Simulation to work for me. I have looked at every tutorial I can find and know how to do standard flow simulations with static components, but this does not help me solve my problem.

When I do the flow simulation wizard, I do not know if this should be done with an Averaging or Sliding rotating region. I also am unsure what I should define as the rotation region.

And is there any other way to find the speed it will rotate other than making a parametric study of different rotational speeds and finding where the sum of the forces on the blades reduces to 0?

Please help.