A New Design Concept for Wind Turbine Airfoil

Abstract

Wind energy has been attracting more and more attentions due to its clean and renewable source. The aerodynamic characteristic of wind turbine airfoil directly affects the turbine efficiency. In order to improve the airfoil aerodynamic characteristic, a new concept airfoil configuration for wind turbine is presented. A cave on the upper surface near the trailing edge is designed to generate a trapped vortex in the cave. The trapped vortex is used to stabilize the separated flow when the airfoil at high angle of attack. Combining with the Gurney flap, the airfoil with the cave behaves very good aerodynamic characteristics at wide range of incidences, especially at high angles of attack. The method is used on the well-known FFA-W3-301 turbine airfoil. By using numerical simulation, it is shown that the new airfoil has a higher lift than the original airfoil at the same angle of attack, the stall angle of attack increases from 12 degree to 17 degree, and the maximum lift coefficient increases approximately 64 percents. In addition, the effects of the chord-wise location of starting point of the designed cave are discussed. Therefore, it is believed that the new-designed concept can be investigated and explored further for wind turbine.

Third Order ENO Scheme on Non-Uniform Grid for Supersonic Flows II

“…The analysis of the different variations of the limiter functions has been done for the developed by authors [1] third order finite-difference shock-capturing essentially non-oscillatory (ENO) scheme for a non-uniform grid. The different slope limiters were revised and adapted on the non-uniform meshes.…”

“…In this paper we extend the development of the third order finite-difference shock-capturing ENO scheme for a non-uniform grid, which we began in [1]. The design of the ENO scheme is based on the methodology for uniform grids proposed by the authors in [2].…”