Design of an Offshore Three-Bladed Vertical Axis Wind Turbine for Wind Tunnel Experiments

Abstract

The rapid shrinkage of fossil fuel sources and contrary fast-growing energy needs of social, industrial and technological enhancements, necessitate the need of different approaches to exploit the various renewable energy sources. Among the several technological alternatives, wind energy is one of the most emerging prospective because of its renewable, sustainable and environment friendly nature, especially at its offshore locations. The recent growth of the offshore wind energy market has significantly increased the technological importance of the offshore vertical axis wind turbines, both as floating or fixed installations. Particularly, the class of liftdriven vertical axis wind turbines is very promising; however, the existing design and technology is not competent enough to meet the global need of offshore wind energy. In this context, the project AEROPITCH co-investigated by EOLFI, CORETI and IRPHE aims at the development of a robust and sophisticated offshore vertical axis wind turbine, which would bring decisive competitive advantage in the offshore wind energy market. In this paper, simulations have been performed on the various airfoils of NACA 4-series, 5-series and Selig profiles at different chord Reynolds numbers of 60000, 100000 and 140000 using double multiple streamtube model with tip loss correction. Based on the power coefficient, the best suitable airfoil S1046 has been selected for a 3-bladed vertical axis wind turbine. Besides the blade profile, the turbine design parameters such as aspect ratio and solidity ratio have also been investigated by varying the diameter and chord of the blade. Further, a series of wind tunnel experiments will be performed on the developed wind turbine, and the implementation of active pitch control in the developed turbine will be investigated in future research.

Performance Analysis of H-Darrieus Wind Turbine with NACA0018 and S1046 Aerofoils: Impact of Blade Angle and TSR

“…Did not study the TSR and pitch angle effect. Aerodynamic performance enhancements of H-rotor Darrieus wind turbine [9] Used S1046 airfoil and introduced wind-lens to improve the performance. Studied various shapes but did not present any comparison with NACA series and did not study the TSR, solidity and pitch angle effect.…”

“…The literature available on the simulation of H-Darrius VAWT performance primarily focused on finding the relative velocities and angle of attacks at different tip speed ratios and azimuthal positions, calculation of the ratio of induced to freestream velocity, methods of calculating the normal and tangential forces etc [9][10][11][12]. Besides, only few studies were conducted on VAWTs utilising S-series aerofoils at various pitch angles.…”

Synthetic jets as a flow control device for performance enhancement of vertical axis hydrokinetic turbines: A 3D computational study

“… The angle of attack (α), defined as the angle between the blade chord and the resultant fluid velocity vector, is given by Eq. (6) [ 19 ]. where, is the azimuth angle presented in Figure 1 .…”

Analytical and Numerical Solution for H-type Darrieus Wind Turbine Performance at the Tip Speed Ratio of Below One

“…Darrieus wind turbine designs were first patented in 1931 (Darrieus 1931). Many researchers studied the effects of design parameters on wind turbine performance (Delafin et al, 2016;Roy et al, 2017). Delafin et al, (2016) studied the effect of number of blades and solidity of VAWT on the power coefficient.…”

“…Hara, Hara, and Hayashi (2012) also concluded that with an increase in moment of inertia of the Darrieus wind turbine, the self-starting problem becomes more sever. Experiments in the wind tunnel showed that at high of the rotor, the Darrieus wind turbine with low blade solidity could generate more power, but at lower , the high solidity wind turbine had greater Cp (Roy et al, 2017). The analytical study of straight-blade design of VAWT for asymmetric blade showed that the increment of Height/Diameter (H/D) of wind turbine increased the mass per height unit material, which in turn led to increased blade solidity and manufacturing costs (Islam et al, 2011).…”