Towards optimal aerodynamic design of vertical axis wind turbines: Impact of solidity and number of blades
By A. Rezaeiha, H. Montazeri, B. Blocken. Energy, 2018
198 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The current study systematically analyzes the impact of solidity (σ) and number of blades (n) on the aerodynamic performance of 2-, 3- and 4-bladed Darrieus H-type vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs). Solidity varies within the wide range of 0.09–0.36. A large number of operational parameters, i.e., tip speed ratio (λ), Reynolds number (Re), turbulence intensity and reduced frequency (K) are investigated to provide a deeper insight into the impact of σ and n on the dynamic loads on blades, the turbine performance and the wake. High-fidelity unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) simulations, extensively validated with experiments, are employed. The results show that the turbine optimal tip speed ratio (λopt) is invariant to a newly-introduced parameter ‘σλ3’, regardless of the turbine geometrical and operational characteristics. In addition, a new correlation is derived to estimate λopt as a function of σ, which can also be employed to predict the optimal σ for a turbine with a given λ. It is also found that: (i) for constant-speed urban VAWTs, which due to the low mean wind speed in the urban environment, frequently operate at moderate to high λ, a relatively-low σ is optimal; (ii) an optimal VAWT is a moderately-high-solidity variable-speed rotor maintaining a relatively-low λ, where due to the large blade chord length the resulting Re and K are favorably high; (iii) within the turbine optimal operational range, turbine power coefficient (CP) is almost independent of n. The present findings support the optimal aerodynamic design of small-to large-scale VAWTs.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Environmental Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b43f5e0eead67c401c9de19d97769824991b149
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Citations in the corpus
- CFD analysis of dynamic stall on vertical axis wind turbines using Scale-Adaptive Simulation (SAS): Comparison against URANS and hybrid RANS/LES (2019, background): “[75,83,99–101], which for brevity are not repeated here.”
- Towards optimal layout design of vertical-axis wind-turbine farms: Double rotor arrangements (2020, methodology): “This is due to a slight asymmetry in the wake of the upstream turbine, which has also been observed in previous experimental and numerical studies for isolated solo VAWTs [27,28].”