Numerical investigation of stall characteristics for winglet blade of a horizontal axis wind turbine

¹ Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad, Prayagraj, India
² RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

^* Corresponding author: shalini@mnnit.ac.in

Abstract

Wind energy is one of the renewable energy resources which is clean and sustainable energy and the wind turbine is used for harnessing energy from the wind. The blades are the key components of a wind turbine to convert wind energy into rotational energy. Recently, wingtip devices are used in the blades of horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT), which decreases the vortex and drag, while increases the lift and thereby improve the performance of the turbine. In the present study, a winglet is used at the tip of an NREL phase VI wind turbine blade. Solidworks, Pointwise, and Ansys-Fluent are used for geometric modeling, computational grid generation, and CFD simulation, respectively. The computational result obtained using SST k-ω turbulence modeling is well validated with the experimental data of NREL at 5 and 7 m/s of wind speeds. Numerical investigation of stall characteristics is carried out for wingleted blade at higher turbulence intensity (21% and 25%) and angle of attack (0⁰ to 30⁰ at 5⁰ intervals) at 7 m/s wind speed. The result found that wingletd blade delay stall to 15⁰ for both the cases of turbulence intensity. Increasing the turbulence intensity increases the lift coefficient at stall angle but drag coefficient also increases and thus a lower aerodynamic performance (C_L/C_D ratio = 13) is obtained. Wingleted blade improves the performance as the intensity of vortices is smaller compared to baseline blade