A Computational Study of The Effect of Blade Thickness on Performance of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

Abstract

Vertical axis wind turbine with straight blade is one of the modern vertical axis wind turbines for converting wind to electrical energy. Power production capability at low speed and turbulent winds and, low disturbing noise with good appearance, makes it suitable to use small scale of this type turbine in urban areas. In view of considering importance of blade aerodynamics in turbine performance, the flow over vertical axis wind turbine with straight blade is simulated by two dimensional computational fluid dynamics. In this regard, several conventional NACA series airfoils are chosen and the effect of airfoil thickness on turbine performance was studied. Blade geometry and grid generation were created in Gambit modeling software and, Fluent software which is based on finite volume method is used for solving the problem. For Numerical solution of unsteady flow around the airfoil, the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) have been used. The simulation results and comparison of power coefficient of vertical axis wind turbine in different thickness blades showed NACA 0012 airfoil has the best coefficient of performance in a range of tip speed ratio (λ>4). Such values are selected for tip speed ratio, so that the dynamic stall area of the blade to be prevented.