EnginSoft - Conference Abstracts

EnginSoft International Conference 2010
CAE Technologies for Industry

Design and Optimization of Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines using a three dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics model

Mauro Stefano - Università degli Studi di Catania (Italy)

Abstract

This study has been carried out to implement a numerical model for the evaluation of wind turbine rotor performance. For this aim, the commercial code ANSYS Fluent has been used, because of its unique Workbench 12.1 to generate meshes and its ability to model the turbulent flows.
To validate the model, we used the behavioral simulation of the NREL PHASE VI horizontal axis turbine and the large range of experimental data that is available for this. In particular, as regards the design process, data about the emitted power related to the wind speed have been compared with the numerical simulation data: the correlation was excellent, with a relative error of less than 5% in the case of incipient stall and completely separated flows as well.
Two stationary RANS turbulences models have been tested on different computational grids: the best results came from the 4 equation SST transition model.
Finally, it was demonstrated that this 3D CFD model could be used in association to a self-produced BEM 1D code for the analysis and design of wind turbines.
Furthermore, the effects derived from the use of winglets could be tested to improve rotor aerodynamic performance.