Dynamic stall investigation of two-dimensional vertical axis wind turbine blades using computational fluid dynamics

Abstract

Vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) are a type of wind turbines, mainly useful for urban and residential areas to produce electricity. It has some advantages over Horizontal axis wind turbines in terms of costs and maintenances. Dynamic Stalling is a common feature of these VAWTs in unsteady flow conditions. In fact, dynamic stalling is regarded as one of the prior obstructions for the improved aerodynamic features of VAWTs. Thus, it is important to understand the effects of dynamic stalling on it. This paper aims to present the dynamic stall investigation of a two-dimensional VAWT blade, i.e. NACA 0012 at the low-speed condition. The phenomenon was simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques to capture the leading-edge vortex (LEV) and trailing edge vortex on the airfoil due to unsteady flow conditions. ANSYS FLUENT with manually hooked UDF subroutine was used to simulate the numerical results which were later compared to experimental data. Unsteady Reynold Average Navier Stokes (URANS) SST k − ω modeling was used to capture the dynamic stalling in a more detailed fashion.