CFD study of some factors affecting performance of HAWT with swept blades

The effect of using winglets to enhance the performance of swept blades of a horizontal axis wind turbine

“…An initial numerical attempt to search for increasing the turbine power using winglet has been carried out for the baseline 0.9-m straight blade HAWT. Then two superior swept blades have been selected from previous work 13 to be tested with winglet at the tip. These swept blades had been derived from the baseline 0.9-m blade to investigate the change in power coefficient.…”

“…All cases under investigation in this study will be built to have around 1.8 million grid elements. This grid size shows good accuracy and economy of solution for the CFD study of baseline blade 13 and swept blades. 18 Therefore, the 120°computational domain dimensions, Figure 3(a), are selected as those in the mentioned studies 13,18 and so the grid size can be used with confidence.…”

“…This grid size shows good accuracy and economy of solution for the CFD study of baseline blade 13 and swept blades. 18 Therefore, the 120°computational domain dimensions, Figure 3(a), are selected as those in the mentioned studies 13,18 and so the grid size can be used with confidence. The same parameters of the previous works 13,18 were used in this article for the moving frame, 19 boundary layer settings, turbulence model, 20 solution control arrangement and pressure-velocity coupling.…”

“…A previous research using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations was directed by Khalafallah et al 13 to study the effect of some of the variables, related to blade sweep, on the performance of the aforementioned turbine. The CFD study included the effect of blade curvature of sweep, sweepstarting point, and sweep direction.…”

“…The same techniques that were used in previous work 13 have been applied in this article. Visual Basic was used to determine the Cartesian coordinates of the blade sections including winglet tip.…”