The majority of research on water turbines focuses on design improvement of large-scale hydrokinetic turbines for power generation, which may have delayed the utilization of kinetic energy contained in rivers and canals. The aim of this paper is to improve the efficiency of a two bladed Savonius type cross-flow hydrokinetic turbine, which can be used as an energy converter to harness free-stream kinetic energy of water. An impinging jet duct design is presented for improving performance of the Savonius turbine in wind application as seen from literature. The performance of the modified turbine is evaluated using CFD software Fluent, and is compared with that of a simple two bladed Savonius water turbine and some of the prominent literature designs of the Savonius turbine. It is shown that the present design exhibits improved performance compared to the selected designs of the Savonius turbine. Further an insight of the improved performance of the modified turbine is also obtained from flow physics study. (C) 2018 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.