Aerodynamic Analysis of wind turbine

Abstract

The thesis investigates the application of vortex theory for analyzing the aerodynamic loads on wind turbine blades. Based on this method, a graphical user friendly program is developed to be used by the industry. The method, however, requires airfoil data of each section of the blade geometry. To this end, a newly published transitional turbulence model and a variation of Explicit Algebraic Reynolds stress models (EARSM) are implemented into the CALC-BFC CFD solver and their potential for calculating airfoil characteristics are studied and compared to the XFOIL program. A hyperbolic mesh generation program is also developed to provide high quality grids for CFD simulations. The overall performance of the method is evaluated against a full 3D CFD analysis by ANSYS-CFX solver.