Design of 10 kW Horizontal-Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) Blade and Aerodynamic Investigation Using Numerical Simulation

Abstract

In this study, a horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) blade with 10,000 Watt power output has been designed by the blade element momentum (BEM) theory and the modified stall model, and the blade aerodynamics are also simulated to investigate its flow structures and aerodynamic characteristics. The design conditions of the turbine blade in order to display the linear distributions of pitch angle in each section include the rated wind speed, design tip speed ratio and design angle of attack that have been set to 10 m/s, 6 and 6°, respectively. The turbine blade geometry was laid out using S822 airfoils and the blade aspect ratio is 8.02 divided into radius of 3 m and chord length of 0.374 m. Next, the improved BEM theory including Viterna- Corrigan stall model, tip-loss factor and stall delay model has been developed for predicting the performance of the designed turbine blade. Finally, the investigations of aerodynamic characteristics for the turbine blade were performed by the numerical simulation. The Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equatios combined with the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model that describes the three dimensional steady state flow on the wind turbine blade were solved with the aid of a commerical Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) code. A structured grid of approximately 2.4 million cells formulates the computational domain. The simulation results are compared with the improvd BEM theory at rated wind speed of 10 m/s and show that the CFD is a good method on aerodynamic invesigation of a HAWT blade.