A Detailed Aerodynamic Design and Analysis of a 2-D Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Using Sliding Mesh in CFD

A number of CFD analyses have been carried out to evaluate various symmetric and cambered airfoils for a standard three blade vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) in 2D having an outer diameter of 2.75 meters. Effects of blade thickness, camber, turbulence intensity in the flow, time step sensitivity, domain size, mesh independence and effect of different turbulence models are studied to obtain the overall best design configuration. A detailed analysis is done for symmetric NACA airfoils that are commonly referenced in the literature with 12%, 15% and 18% thickness along with a suggested baseline thicker NACA0022 airfoil. The results are presented for TSR range from 1.0 to 4.0 and for a range of oncoming wind velocities from 6 m/sec to 14 m/sec. It is found that NACA0022 airfoil gives the best overall performance.