Investigation of passive root flaps on HAWT: An experimental analysis of different configurations of root flaps on the performance of Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines

Passive root flaps and in particular the Gurney flaps have been employed for improving aerodynamic characteristics for various applications since the 1970's. The effects of passive flaps on two dimensional airfoils have therefore been studied extensively, however, research on their application to Horizontal axis wind turbine blades (HAWT) is...

Wake Deflection Technique for Vertical Axis Wind Turbines using Actuator Line Model in OpenFOAM

Modelling of Vortex Generators within the Integral Boundary-Layer Theory

One of the most commonly used flow control techniques to trim the aerodynamic performance of wind turbine blades are vortex generators. This passive device, which does not require any active energy, is gaining an increasing interest in this sector especially due to the trend of increasing wind turbine size. Vortex generators are a flow control...

Analysis of an Actuator Disc under Unsteady Loading: Validation of Engineering Models using Experimental and Numerical Methods

Wind turbines operate in the earth's atmospheric boundary layer - an environment where the climate is turbulent and unsteady. In addition, wind turbines usually operate in clusters (wind farms) and are thus subjected to the unsteady wakes generated by upstream turbines. Because of the unsteady inflow, wind turbines suffer from structural fatigue...

3D Lagrangian VPM-FMM for Modelling the Near-Wake of a HAWT: The development of a stable, accurate, and efficient numerical solver for large-scale wind energy purposes

Traditionally, the design of the Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) has relied on momentum-based methods such as the Blade Element-Momentum (BEM) models. With the growth of computational power, optimization of wind turbines by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for the explicit wake modelling is becoming more mainstream. Wake modelling is...

Structural Optimization Of A Vertical Axis Wind Turbine With Aeroelastic Analysis

Currently, the price per kW of offshore wind energy is 55% larger than onshore [38, 52]. Of this price, the rotor corresponds to 22%. To reduce the price of wind energy, it is necessary to investigate wind turbine concepts with scales above 10 MW. The commonly known Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) requires offshore a large support structure....