Aerodynamic Optimization of a Swept Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine Blade

Abstract

The aerodynamic shapes of the blades are still of high importance and various aerodynamic designs have been developed in order to increase the amount of energy production. In this study, a swept horizontal axis wind turbine blade has been optimized to increase the aerodynamic efficiency using the computational fluid dynamics method. To illustrate the technique, a wind turbine with a rotor diameter of 0.94 m has been used as the baseline turbine, and the most appropriate swept blade design parameters, namely the sweep start-up section, tip displacement, and mode of the sweep have been investigated to obtain the maximum power coefficient at the design tip speed ratio. At this stage, a new equation that allows all three swept blade design parameters to be changed independently has been used to design swept blades, and the response surface method has been used to find out the optimum swept blade parameters. According to the results obtained, a significant increase of 4.28% in the power coefficient was achieved at the design tip speed ratio with the newly designed optimum swept wind turbine blade. Finally, baseline and optimum swept blades have been compared in terms of power coefficients at different tip speed ratios, force distributions, pressure distributions, and tip vortices.