Design and computational flow field analysis of horizontal axis wind turbine

Abstract

The proposed objective of the CFD analysis is to investigate the flow field around a horizontal axis wind turbine rotor and calculate the turbine’s power. In this study, a full three dimensional computational fluid dynamics method based on Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes approach was used. The wind turbine with rotor diameter of six meters has three blades. In a moving reference frame system, one third of the wind turbine rotor was modeled by means of 120o periodicity. The coefficient of power curve obtained from the CFD results is compared with experimental data obtained by NREL Phase VI rotor experiment. The numerical result for the coefficient of power curve shows close agreement with the experimental data. The simulation results include the pressure distribution, velocity distribution along the flow direction, turbulent wake behind the wind turbine, and the turbine’s power. The discussion includes the effect of wind speed on turbine’s power