AERODYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF WIND TURBINE ROTOR BLADES

Abstract

One of the main achievements of the PLGrid Plus project is the implementation of new tools and services designed for the numerical prediction of the aerodynamic performance of wind energy turbines. An innovative and unique integration tool (Aero-T) is aiming at automating all stages (pre-, solution and post-processing) of the numerical simulation of the flow around wind turbine rotor blades using commercial CFD software based on the RANS approach and block-structured computational grids. The FINE/Turbo package (Numeca Int.) is applied in the structured grid generation process and solution phases, while the analysis of results is left to the Tecplot 360 (Tecplot Inc.) software. A demonstrator based on the NREL Phase VI rotor experiment (conducted at NASA Ames) is introduced to prove the excellent prediction capabilities of Aero-T.