Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2021
26th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Performance of the NREL Phase VI wind turbine blades with Wavy Leading Edge projected proportional to the blade local chord
Submission Author:
Juan Flores Mezarina , SP
Co-Authors:
Juan Flores Mezarina, Andressa Garcia, Hernán Cerón-Muñoz
Presenter: Juan Flores Mezarina
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2021.COB2021-0766
Abstract
The Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWT) are designed to operate under the most probable wind speeds and transform the wind kinetic energy into useful energy. However, the complex environmental conditions limit their operational range. The Wavy Leading Edge (WLE) is a passive control flow device inspired on the Humpback whale pectoral flippers. It generates counter-rotating vortices at the leading edge that re-energize the flow and prevents its abrupt detachment. This delays stall and increases lift after stall in diverse degrees, according to the WLE governing parameters: amplitude and wavelength. Since the HAWT operational range includes high wind speeds at which their blades operate mostly in a deep stall regime, it is valid to take into account the WLE on their design. Studies on the performance effects of the WLE on the NREL Phase VI wind turbine blades showed that it degrades the blade performance at the turbine design wind speed (10 m/s) and significantly enhances it at higher speeds (>10 m/s). In these studies, the WLE dimensions were set constant along the entire blade span, while the blade chord decreases towards its tip. Under this approach, the WLE amplitude and wavelength ratios vary along the entire blade and turn the WLE configuration optimum only at a specific section of the blade span. In this study, the blade chord reduction was taken in account when projecting the WLE. As result its amplitude and wavelength ratios are set constant to the blade local chord along the entire blade. The analysis was carried out using CFD simulations at different wind speeds. Under this approach, the blade performance is less degraded by the WLE at its design wind speed and it is still significantly increased at high wind speeds. Therefore, the wind turbine optimum operational range can be extended and adapted to different locations only by adapting the blades WLE ratios.
Keywords
Wavy Leading Edge, NREL Phase VI, wind energy, Biomimetics, WLE
