Wind tunnel and numerical study of a small vertical axis wind turbine

This paper presents a combined experimental and computational study into the aerodynamics and performance of a small scale vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT). Wind tunnel tests were carried out to ascertain overall performance of the turbine and two- and three-dimensional unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models were generated to help understand the aerodynamics of this performance.Wind tunnel performance results are presented for cases of different wind velocity, tip-speed ratio and solidity as well as rotor blade surface finish. It is shown experimentally that the surface roughness on the turbine rotor blades has a significant effect on performance. Below a critical wind speed (Reynolds number of 30,000) the performance of the turbine is degraded by a smooth rotor surface finish but above it, the turbine performance is enhanced by a smooth surface finish. Both two bladed and three bladed rotors were tested and a significant increase in performance coefficient is observed for the higher solidity rotors (three bladed rotors) over most of the operating range. Dynamic stalling behaviour and the resulting large and rapid changes in force coefficients and the rotor torque are shown to be the likely cause of changes to rotor pitch angle that occurred during early testing. This small change in pitch angle caused significant decreases in performance.The performance coefficient predicted by the two dimensional computational model is significantly higher than that of the experimental and the three-dimensional CFD model. The predictions show that the presence of the over tip vortices in the 3D simulations is responsible for producing the large difference in efficiency compared to the 2D predictions. The dynamic behaviour of the over tip vortex as a rotor blade rotates through each revolution is also explored in the paper.     

Study on power performance for straight-bladed vertical axis wind turbine by field and wind tunnel test

In this paper, the power performance of straight-bladed VAWT is experimentally investigated by wind tunnel experiment and field test. The test rotor is two-bladed with NACA0021 airfoil profile. A survey of varying unsteady wind parameters is conducted to examine the effects of blade pitch angle, Reynolds number and wind velocity on the power performance of VAWT. Moreover, the flow field characteristics are obtained through measuring the wind velocity by Laser Doppler Velocimeter (LDV) system in the wind tunnel experiment and three-cup type anemometers in field test. Power and torque performance are obtained through a torque meter installed in rotor shaft of the wind turbine. Experimental results estimated from the measured values from field test and wind tunnel experiment are compared. In this research, power performance and flow field characteristics are discussed and the relationship between operating conditions and wind velocity are verified. These results provided a theoretical guiding significance to the development of VAWT simplified.     

分流导叶垂直轴风力机气动性能研究

为提高垂直轴风力机气动性能,提出一种随相位角变化而改变相对夹角的分流导叶结构。以NACA0021为基础翼型,采用计算流体力学方法对分流导叶作用下垂直轴风力机风能利用系数、单叶片瞬时转矩、压力系数及速度场进行数值分析。结果表明：静态和动态分流导叶均可提高垂直轴风力机气动性能,且动态分流导叶提升效果更为显著;相较于静态分流导叶,动态分流导叶垂直轴风力机在尖速比为2.33时风能利用系数最高可提升23%,在尖速比为2.03时静态分流导叶垂直轴风力机较原始垂直轴风力机风能利用系数提高37%;分流导叶也可使最佳尖速比前移,稳定叶片转矩波动,提升垂直轴风力机的运行稳定性。     

Turbulence influence on wind energy extraction for a medium size vertical axis wind turbine

The relation between power performance and turbulence intensity for a VAWT H‐rotor is studied using logged data from a 14 month (discontinuous) period with the H‐rotor operating in wind speeds up to 9 m/s. The turbine, designed originally for a nominal power of 200 kW, operated during this period mostly in a restricted mode due to mechanical concerns, reaching power levels up to about 80 kW. Two different approaches are used for presenting results, one that can be compared to power curves consistent with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard and one that allows isolating the effect of turbulence from the cubic variation of power with wind speed. Accounting for this effect, the turbine still shows slightly higher efficiency at higher turbulence, proposing that the H‐rotor is well suited for wind sites with turbulent winds. The operational data are also used to create a C_p(λ) curve, showing slightly lower C_p compared with a curve simulated by a double multiple streamtube model. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

直线翼垂直轴风力机静态叶片结冰的观测与分析

设计制作了采用NACA0015翼型的直线翼垂直轴风力机叶片,安装于寒冷地区的室外.冬季,对雨雪等在静止叶片表面的附着情况进行了现场观测.将获得到的叶片表面结霜和结冰(霜状冰和瘤状冰)的观测结果与温度、湿度、风速和风向等气象条件进行了对比分析,研究了静止叶片表面结霜和结冰的产生机理与气象条件的影响关系.针对翼型表面瘤状结冰情况下翼型改变前后的静态升阻力系数进行了数值模拟计算,分析了翼型改变对升阻力特性和静态特性的影响.     

Energy production assessment of small wind farms

The present work investigates the performance and the energy production of a grid-connected wind farm during six years of operation. The layout and the single line diagram of this wind farm are shown. A complete record of operational data for five turbines is analysed to study the performance of the wind farm. The study illustrates the variation of the energy and wind speed on annual and monthly basis for the whole examined period. On the other hand, the annual growth in the local consumption of the wind farm is shown. As an important indicator, the capacity factor is analysed for single turbines and for the whole wind farm. Finally, the study attempts to correlate the results to the external and internal factors affecting the performance of these turbines using the available database.     

Analysis of the turbine standstill for a grid connected wind farm (case study)

In the present paper, several types of collected data were employed to analyse the causes of turbines shutdown in a grid-connected wind farm. Although the average availability of the considered wind farm exceeds 96%, the individual availability of some turbines does not exceed 92%. In this context, the present paper introduces a novel approach of understanding the turbine standstill and availability calculation. This approach is based on a variation of monthly energy production to weight the shutdown time including the maintenance and fault hours. The calm hours in summer are 60% less than the average calm time for the considered wind farm. The distribution of inoperative hours reveals a 300% difference between the original and weighed times of downtime. On the other hand, weighed times are used to assess the impact of various faults causing turbines shutdown. The frequency distribution of the faults has shown that 42% of turbine shutdowns are caused by network disturbances, 70% of them are attributed to grid disconnections. Finally, the time distribution of the network faults is investigated to illustrate their impact on the turbine standstill.     

叶片交叠布置垂直轴风力机气动性能研究

对麦克马斯特大学H型垂直轴风力机进行改进,交错布置其叶片,设计了一种叶片交叠布置垂直轴风力机。基于CFD方法计算典型工况下叶片交叠布置垂直轴风力机的功率,结果表明,在相同几何尺寸和工况下叶片交叠布置垂直轴风力机的功率系数高于麦克马斯特大学H型垂直轴风力机,在尖速比为1.6时,最大功率系数达到0.338。最后分析了风场的涡强和风速分布特性,得出叶片交叠布置对于减少尾流影响具有显著作用的结论。     

建筑体对下游垂直轴风力机气动性能影响研究

为有效利用城市风能,提高风力机运行效率,需对建筑体下游风力机位置分布开展研究。采用计算流体力学方法分析不同建筑体结构下游各位置处风速及风力机气动性能。结果表明：建筑体对自由来流的阻塞、加速与偏转作用可有效提高下游部分位置处风速,提升风力机气动性能;圆形建筑体对下游流场影响较小,各位置处平均风速接近自由来流;相比之下,三角形与四边形建筑体下游风速波动较为剧烈,平均风速较高,风力机转矩较圆形建筑体下游风力机的有较大提升;对于相同外廓建筑体,立式矩形较大的受风面积可扩大其背风低压区范围,有效提高下游流场风速,较卧式矩形建筑体具有更好的聚风效果。     

Plasma‐based feed‐forward dynamic stall control on a vertical axis wind turbine

Dynamic stall was controlled on a double‐bladed H‐Rotor vertical axis wind turbine model using pulsed dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuators in a feed‐forward control configuration. The azimuthal angles of plasma actuation initiation and termination, that produced the largest increases in power, were determined parametrically on the upstream half of the turbine azimuth in a low‐speed blow‐down wind tunnel at wind speeds of 7 m/s. A mathematical model, together with instantaneous turbine speed, was used to estimate transient torque and power developed by the turbine under the influence of plasma actuation. Overall performance improvements were based on changes between the final actuated and initial baseline results. A remarkable result of this investigation was that a net turbine power increase of 10% was measured. This was achieved by systematically reducing plasma pulsation duty cycles as well as the plasma initiation and termination angles. Nevertheless, it was determined that further performance increases could be achieved by changing the actuator's dielectric material, increasing the turbine radius and developing a method for control of dynamic stall on both the upwind (inboard of the blades) and downwind (outboard of the blades) halves of the turbine azimuth. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

对转方向和相位差对并列式双垂直轴风电机组气动性能的影响

对转方向和相位差对并列式双垂直轴风电机组的气动性能至关重要,决定了风电机组叶片受力特性和功率输出特性。为研究对转方向和相位差对并列式双垂直轴风电机组气动性能的影响,文章采用致动线方法(ALM)对一组并列式双垂直轴风电机组进行了三维数值模拟。首先,通过风洞试验数据验证了ALM预测出的垂直轴风电机组功率输出的准确性。继而使用验证后的数值方法对该并列式双垂直轴风电机组的气动性能进行了分析。结果表明:对转方向和相位差对并列式双垂直轴风电机组的气动性能有显著影响,如不考虑相位差,并列式双垂直轴风电机组的同向旋转布置和反向逆流旋转布置会对系统的气动性能产生负面影响,而反向顺流旋转布置会产生正面影响;考虑相位差的影响时,反向逆流旋转布置仍然被证明具有负面影响,反向顺流旋转布置对气动性能的有益效果也将得到增强,但修改相位差可以减少甚至抵消由同向旋转布置引起的功率损耗。对于所采用的两叶片双垂直轴风电机组,80°的相位差和反向顺流旋转布置是最佳配置参数,与二倍单机功率相比,该布置可以使并列式双垂直轴风电机组增加约6%的功率输出。     

An upper size of vertical axis wind turbines

The scaling behaviour of a straight‐bladed vertical axis wind turbine is considered. A scaling scheme is described that, in the presence of a wind shear profile, aims at leaving the material stresses of the scaled construction unchanged. On the basis of a recent 200 kW three‐bladed H‐rotor design, a structural upper size of the turbine is proposed, this size being the scale at which the gravitational force starts to become important. As gravity has a much worse scaling behaviour than the aerodynamic and centrifugal forces, the construction work will become increasingly more difficult above this scale. The upper size is estimated to be around 30 MW. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impact of aerodynamic modelling on seakeeping performance of a floating vertical axis wind turbine

This study focuses on the impact of the aerodynamic model on the dynamic response of a floating vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT). It compares a state‐of‐the‐art quasi‐steady double multiple streamtube (DMS) solver, a prescribed vortex wake (PVW), and a free vortex wake (FVW) solver. The aerodynamic loads acting on a bottom‐fixed VAWT and computed with the three aerodynamic solvers are compared, then the dynamic responses of the floating turbine in irregular waves and turbulent wind with the different aerodynamic solvers are compared. Differences are observed, particularly in the mean motions of the platform. Eventually, the aerodynamic damping computed by the solvers are estimated with aerodynamic simulations on the turbine with imposed surge and pitch motions. The estimated damping can then be correlated with the dynamic response amplitude of the VAWT. Substantial discrepancies are observed between the three solvers at high tip speed ratio, when the rotor is highly loaded. It is shown that the quasi‐steady DMS solver seems to give greater amplitude of motions for the floating VAWT because of strong rotor/wake interaction that are not correctly accounted for.     

Starting torque improvement using J-shaped straight-bladed Darrieus vertical axis wind turbine by means of numerical simulation

In this study a 3 kW straight–bladed Darrieus type Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) is investigated numerically using OpenFOAM computational fluid dynamic package. The newly proposed J-Shaped profile is used as the blade airfoil in the simulation. The J-Shaped profile is designed by means of eliminating a fraction of pressure side of Du 06-W-200 airfoil. The main purpose of this investigation is the improvement of the VAWT starting torque using J-shaped profile. The power curves for both conventional and J-shaped profiles are calculated and the torque variation is obtained at different azimuth angles. In addition, the vorticity and pressure field surrounding the wind turbine is presented. The results indicate that the performance of turbine is optimized for J-shaped profile which eliminates the pressure side of airfoil from the maximum thickness toward the trailing edge. Moreover, by employing this J-Shaped profile, the wind turbine performance is intensified TSRs and self-starting of turbine is improved.     

垂直轴风力机两种翼型气动性能比较研究

叶片是风力机最重要的组成部分,在不同的风能资源情况下,翼型的选择对垂直轴风力机气动特性有着重要的影响。文章分别以NACA0018翼型(对称翼型)和NACA4418翼型(非对称翼型)建立3叶片H型垂直轴风力机二维仿真模型。应用数值模拟的研究方法,从功率系数、单个叶片切向力系数等方面比较两种风力机模型在不同叶尖速比下的气动特性,并采用风洞实验数据验证了流场计算的准确性。CFD计算结果表明:在低叶尖速比下,NACA4418翼型风力机气动特性优于NACA0018翼型风力机,适用于低风速区域;在高叶尖速比下,NACA0018翼型风力机气动特性较好,适用于高风速地区。而且在高叶尖速比时,NACA0018翼型在上风区时,切向力系数平均值要高于NACA4418翼型,在下风区时,NACA418翼型切向力系数平均值高。该研究可为小型垂直轴风力机翼型的选择提供参考。     

Innovative improvement of a drag wind turbine performance

Drag type wind turbines have strong potential in small and medium power applications due to their simple design. However, a major disadvantage of this design is the noticeable low conversion efficiency. Therefore, more research is required to improve the efficiency of this design. The present work introduces a novel design of a three-rotor Savonius turbine with rotors arranged in a triangular pattern. The performance of the new design is assessed by computational modeling of the flow around the three rotors. The 2D computational model is firstly applied to investigate the performance of a single rotor design to validate the model by comparison with experimental measurements. The model introduced an acceptable accuracy compared to the experimental measurements. The performance of the new design is then investigated using the same model. The results indicated that the new design performance has higher power coefficient compared with single rotor design. The peak power coefficient of the three rotor turbine is 44% higher than that of the single rotor design (relative increase). The improved performance is attributed to the favorable interaction between the rotors which accelerates the flow approaching the downstream rotors and generates higher turning moment in the direction of rotation of each rotor.     

Direct calculation of wind turbine tip loss

The usual method to account for a finite number of blades in blade element calculations of wind turbine performance is through a tip loss factor. Most analyses use the tip loss approximation due to Prandtl which is easily and cheaply calculated but is known to be inaccurate at low tip speed ratio. We develop three methods for the direct calculation of the tip loss. The first is the computationally expensive calculation of the velocities induced by the helicoidal wake which requires the evaluation of infinite sums of products of Bessel functions. The second uses the asymptotic evaluation of those sums by Kawada. The third uses the approximation due to Okulov which avoids the sums altogether. These methods are compared to the tip loss determined independently and exactly for an ideal three-bladed rotor at tip speed ratios between zero and 15. Kawada's asymptotic approximation and Okulov's equations are preferable to the Prandtl factor at all tip speed ratios, with the Okulov equations being generally more accurate. In particular the tip loss factor exceeds unity near the axis of rotation by a large amount at all tip speed ratios, which Prandtl's factor cannot reproduce. Neither the Kawada nor the Okulov equations impose a large computational burden on a blade element program.     

驱动热泵的垂直轴风力机风轮气动特性数值分析

根据风能热泵系统的工作环境及匹配特性,针对给定供热面积的系统各参数选取方法以及垂直轴风力机风轮设计进行了探讨,在此基础上初步完成了额定功率为300 W的风轮设计,并利用二维数值模拟方法对不同叶尖速比下的性能曲线进行计算,分析得到了额定风速9.00 m/s时,驱动压缩机的最佳风轮转速为350~375r/min。结果表明,300 W垂直轴风力机的输出特性可满足风能热泵机组的工作要求,该数值分析结果可为风能供热技术的应用示范提供理论支撑。     

PIV measurements and CFD simulation of the performance and flow physics and of a small‐scale vertical axis wind turbine

The aerodynamics generated by a small small‐scale vertical axis wind turbine are illustrated in detail as a NACA0022 rotor blade carries out a complete rotation at three tip speed ratios. These aerodynamic details are then linked to the wind turbine performance. This is achieved by using detailed experimental measurements of performance and near‐blade particle image velocimetry (PIV) and also by using a two‐dimensional Reynolds‐averaged Navier–Stokes‐based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. Uniquely, therefore, the CFD model is validated against both PIV visualizations and performance measurements. At low tip speed ratios ( λ = 2), the flow field is dominated by large‐scale stalling behaviour as shown in both the experimental results and simulations. The onset of stall appears to be different between the experiment and simulation, with the simulation showing a gradual separation progressing forward from the trailing edge, while the experiment shows a more sudden leading‐edge roll‐up. Overall, similar scales of vortices are shed at a similar rate in both the experimental results and simulations. The most significant CFD–PIV differences are observed in predicting flow re‐attachment. At a higher tip speed ratio ( λ = 3), the flow separates slightly later than in the previous condition, and as occurs in the lower tip speed ratio, the main differences between the experiment and the simulation are in the flow re‐attachment process, specifically that the simulations predicts a delay in the process. At a tip speed ratio of 4, smaller predicted flow separation in the latter stages of the upwind part of the rotation is the main difference in comparison to the experiment. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of wind speed at the top of the tower on the performance and energy generated from _thermosyphon solar turbine

Energy generated from wind turbine depends to a great extent on the wind speed at its inlet. The use of thermosyphon solar tower is an attempt to increase the air velocity at inlet of the wind turbine and of course to increase its power. The wind speed in a certain location changes always with time and with the height above ground surface. In this work, the effect of wind speed at the top of the tower on the performance as well as on the energy generated from thermosyphon solar turbine was studied theoretically. One location in Egypt was chosen for this study. The calculations were achieved mainly with the solar turbine located at tower bottom. For the purpose of comparison, the energy generated from the solar turbine was compared with that generated from free wind turbine at tower height with the absence of solar tower. It was found that, the wind speed at the top of the tower results in a pressure drop which affects the performance of the thermosyphon solar turbine. This pressure drop increases with the rise in wind speed and will be zero only when the wind speed at the top of the tower reaches zero. It was found also that, there is an increase in friction losses through the tower and a decrease in both temperature difference between inlet and outlet of the tower and in heat losses from tower walls with the rise in wind speed in location. The inlet air velocity to the solar turbine and consequently its specific power were found to be increased with the increase in wind speed at the top of the tower. Therefore, the effect of wind speed at the top of the tower must be taken into account during thermosyphon solar tower calculations. By comparing the performance of solar turbine and the free wind turbine located at tower height with the absence of thermosyphon solar tower, it was found that the mean inlet air velocity to the solar turbine located at tower bottom and consequently its specific power are higher than these values for free wind turbine. The mean inlet air velocity to the solar turbine is found to be 117% of its value for a free wind turbine. The yearly specific energy generated from solar turbine is expected to be 157% of its value for free wind turbine.