Semi automated improvement of wind blade design

D. Perfiliev, A.  Kosmacheva,  J. Backman,  J. Hämäläinen

10^th European Conference on Turbomachinery Fluid dynamics & Thermodynamics

Paper ID:

ETC2013-011

Main Topic:

Wind Turbines

Authors

D. Perfiliev, A. Kosmacheva, J. Backman, J. Hämäläinen - Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland

Abstract

This work develops an iterative semi-automated mechanism for wind blade geometry improvement. Implementation of the lately introduced aerodynamic, economic and mechanic analysis technique coupled with robust airfoil characteristics coding allowed to fasten the search procedure and to use the extensively applied Matlab programming environment. The obtained optimal solutions based on the power efficiency improvement while maintaining the same capital investments as the original blade geometry provided significant advantages. While looking for the optimal chord and twist distribution for the considered WindPACT 1.5 MW wind turbine and IIIB IEC wind class with the BEM approach, the power efficiency improved by 1.4% compared to the original blade geometry. The same procedure coupled with the optimal cross-sectional search provided an improvement of 4.9% in the power coefficient. The results were validated against the CFD-RANS procedure. With some minor fluctuations, the results of BEM and CFD agree well with each other.