CFD Simulation of HAWT Blade and Implementation of BEM Theory

Abstract

Wind turbine blade design is of profound importance in renewable energy industry. In this study, a blade of Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) was designed with the implementation of Blade Element Momentum Theory (BEM). With a Tip speed ratio (TSR) of 8, a blade of radius 10 m was designed with NACA 63-615 as considered airfoil. In order to study the characteristics of flow over the designed blade, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations using ANSYS Fluent package were performed. Using frame motion, an unstructured mesh of around 2 million, and y + = 1, contours of pressure, velocity, and flow around the immediate vicinity of the blade were shown. The value of torque was found to be 5.6 kN for the designed blade. Lastly a grid convergence study was done to find out the optimal size of mesh for this kind of simulation. Results clearly shown the efficacy of fluent package to model simulations of this type.