Abstract
Wind energy is one of the fastest growing renewable energy sources, and the most developed energy extraction device that harnesses this energy is the Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT). Increasing the efficiency of HAWTs is one important topic in current research with multiple aspects to look at such as blade design and rotor array optimization. This study looked at the effect of wingtip devices, a split winglet, in particular, to reduce the drag induced by the wind vortices at the blade tip, hence increasing performance. Split winglet implementation was done using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) on the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) Phase VI sequence H. In total, there are four (4) blade configurations that are simulated, the base NREL Phase VI sequence H blade, an extended version of the previous blade to equalize length of the blades, the base blade with a winglet and the base blade with split winglet. Results at wind speeds of 7 m/s to 15 m/s show that adding a winglet increased the power generation, on an average, by 1.23%, whereas adding a split winglet increased it by 2.53% in comparison to the extended blade. The study also shows that the increase is achieved by reducing the drag at the blade tip and because of the fact that the winglet and split winglet generating lift themselves. This, however, comes at a cost, i.e., an increase in thrust of 0.83% and 2.05% for the blades with winglet and split winglet, respectively, in comparison to the extended blade.
Highlights
Wind energy is one of the fastest growing renewable energy sources
The following are the results from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) phase VI sequence H experiment and from the simulation using Ansys Fluent of the four types of rotor blade modeled: base rotor blade, extended rotor blade, rotor blade with winglet and rotor blade with split winglet
Each rotor blade was run on seven different wind velocities, 7 m/s, 8 m/s, 9 m/s, 10 m/s, 11 m/s, 13 m/s and 15 m/s, totaling to 35 data points, 28 of which are simulated and 7 are data from the NREL phase VI experiment
Summary
Wind energy is one of the fastest growing renewable energy sources. Data for the Philippines from 2005–2018 shows that as of 2018 the Philippines had 426.9 MW of installed capacity for wind energy. Majority of the additions for the Philippines wind energy capacity came from. 2014–2015 with the National Renewable Energy Plan foreseeing a total value of 2378 MW by 2030 [2,3]. Wind energy resource assessments showed that there are around 11,055 km of land area that are rated good to excellent for wind energy use. Using conservative assumptions of about 7 MW/km , these areas could support more than 76,000 MW of potential installed capacity, delivering more than 195 billion kWh per year [4]
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