Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2023
27th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Impact of airfoil thickness on the rotational effect over wind-turbine-blade flow
Submission Author:
Daniel Sampaio Souza , SP
Co-Authors:
Daniel Sampaio Souza, Nathan Oliveira Assis
Presenter: Daniel Sampaio Souza
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2023.COB2023-0613
Abstract
The aerodynamic load on inboard sections of rotating wings is often significantly greater than the one expected for the corresponding airfoil at rectilinear motion with the same angle of attack and Reynolds number. A better understanding of this phenomenon, frequently referred to as rotational augmentation, is of great importance for the development of more reliable aerodynamic prediction tools. The aim of this research is to investigate the impact of airfoil thickness on the response to the blade-section rotation of the flow and of the aerodynamic performance considering conditions representative of horizontal-axis wind turbines. Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes simulations in a non-inertial reference frame considering periodicity in the spanwise direction were carried out using the open-source package OpenFOAM. The results indicate that the effect of rotation on drag depends on the airfoil thickness. Moreover, they corroborate that a mechanism different from the centrifugal pumping, probably the radial planetary vorticity tilting, is relevant for the volume reduction caused by rotation on the region of separated flow. For both geometries at the tested conditions, the results suggest that the rotational lift increase is due to the weakening of the decambering effect which, in turn, is a consequence of the aforementioned volume reduction.
Keywords
HAWT, Rotational augmentation, Finite volume method
