Navier-Stokes computations on wind turbine blades

Authors:

  • Conway Stephen

Publish date: 2004-01-01

Report number: FOI-R--1444--SE

Pages: 43

Written in: English

Abstract

This report details the work carried out at FOI within the EU financed project Know-Blade. CFD calculations using advanced turbulence models and transition prediction methods were carried out on a total of four rotating and non rotating wind turbine cases using two different wind turbine blade geometries. A number of European research institutes were involved in computing the different test cases. For the most part, comparison is made with results obtained by Risø National Laboratory. Where possible the computational results have been compared with wind tunnel data. Overall a good agreement between the measured and experimental results is obtained. It is shown that CFD solvers can be applied successfully to the study of wind turbines and that detailed information of the surrounding flowfield and forces acting on the blade can be extracted from the solutions.