Investigation on aerodynamics and active flow control of a vertical axis wind turbine with flapped airfoil

Abstract

A 2D unsteady numerical simulation with dynamic and sliding meshing techniques was conducted to solve the flow around a threeblade Vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT). The circular wakes, strip-like wakes and the shedding vortex structures interact with each other result in an extremely unstable performance. An airfoil with a trailing edge flap, based on the NACA0012 airfoil, has been designed for VAWT to improve flow field around the turbine. Strategy of flap control is applied to regulate the flap angle. The results show that the flapped airfoil has an positive effect on damping trailing edge wake separation, deferring dynamic stall and reducing the oscillating amplitude. The circular wake vortices change into strip vortices during the pitch-up interval of the airfoils. Examination of the flow details around the rotating airfoil indicates that flap control improves the dynamic stall by diminishing the trend of flow separation. Airfoil stall separation has been suppressed since the range of nominal angle of attack is narrowed down by an oscillating flap. Vortices with large intensity over rotational region are reduced by 90 %. The lift coefficient hysteresis loop of flapped airfoil acts as an O type, which represents a more stable unsteady performance. With flap control, the peak of power coefficient has increased by 10 % relative to the full blade VAWT. Obviously, the proposed flapped airfoil design combined with the active flow control significantly has shown the potential to eliminate dynamic stall and improve the aerodynamic performance and operation stability of VAWT.