Abstract
The sensitivity of vertical-axis wind turbine startup to airfoil aerodynamic performance characteristics is analyzed. Existing poststall airfoil data and the corrections used in acquiring them are critiqued. Uncertainties in the existing data that are large enough to impact on vertical-axis wind turbine startup modeling are established, with wind-tunnel blockage identified as a potential cause of the discrepancies. Using a conventional closed-section wind tunnel with blockage corrections applied to data and a passive, tolerant test section design, tests are conducted on five NACA 0015 airfoils with a range of chord lengths. The passive tunnel is found to be better at minimizing the effects of blockage, and it makes no use of correction formulas that are not strictly applicable when flow is separated because they are based on potential flow theory. Preliminary results are presented from a study varying Reynolds numbers and showing little variation in poststall performance for the NACA 0015 in the range of Reynolds numbers from to .
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