scholarly journals Numerical Investigation of Passive Vortex Generators on a Wind Turbine Airfoil Undergoing Pitch Oscillations

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengyong Zhu ◽  
Tongguang Wang ◽  
Jianghai Wu

Passive vortex generators (VGs) are widely used to suppress the flow separation of wind turbine blades, and hence, to improve rotor performance. VGs have been extensively investigated on stationary airfoils; however, their influence on unsteady airfoil flow remains unclear. Thus, we evaluated the unsteady aerodynamic responses of the DU-97-W300 airfoil with and without VGs undergoing pitch oscillations, which is a typical motion of the turbine unsteady operating conditions. The airfoil flow is simulated by numerically solving the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations with fully resolved VGs. Numerical modelling is validated by good agreement between the calculated and experimental data with respect to the unsteady-uncontrolled flow under pitch oscillations, and the steady-controlled flow with VGs. The dynamic stall of the airfoil was found to be effectively suppressed by VGs. The lift hysteresis intensity is greatly decreased, i.e., by 72.7%, at moderate unsteadiness, and its sensitivity to the reduced frequency is favorably reduced. The influences of vane height and chordwise installation are investigated on the unsteady aerodynamic responses as well. In a no-stall flow regime, decreasing vane height and positioning VGs further downstream can lead to relatively high effectiveness. Compared with the baseline VG geometry, the smaller VGs can decrease the decay exponent of nondimensionalized peak vorticity by almost 0.02, and installation further downstream can increase the aerodynamic pitch damping by 0.0278. The obtained results are helpful to understand the dynamic stall control by means of conventional VGs and to develop more effective VG designs for both steady and unsteady wind turbine airfoil flow.

Author(s):  
D. De Tavernier ◽  
C. Ferreira ◽  
A. Viré ◽  
B. LeBlanc ◽  
S. Bernardy

Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 2535
Author(s):  
Chengyong Zhu ◽  
Tongguang Wang ◽  
Jie Chen ◽  
Wei Zhong

Passive vortex generators (VGs) have been widely applied on wind turbines to boost the aerodynamic performance. Although VGs can delay the onset of static stall, the effect of VGs on dynamic stall is still incompletely understood. Therefore, this paper aims at investigating the deep dynamic stall of NREL S809 airfoil controlled by single-row and double-row VGs. The URANS method with VGs fully resolved is used to simulate the unsteady airfoil flow. Firstly, both single-row and double-row VGs effectively suppress the flow separation and reduce the fluctuations in aerodynamic forces when the airfoil pitches up. The maximum lift coefficient is therefore increased beyond 40%, and the onset of deep dynamic stall is also delayed. This suggests that deep dynamic-stall behaviors can be properly controlled by VGs. Secondly, there is a great difference in aerodynamic performance between single-row and double-row VGs when the airfoil pitches down. Single-row VGs severely reduce the aerodynamic pitch damping by 64%, thereby undermining the torsional aeroelastic stability of airfoil. Double-row VGs quickly restore the decreased aerodynamic efficiency near the maximum angle of attack, and also significantly accelerate the flow reattachment. The second-row VGs can help the near-wall flow to withstand the adverse pressure gradient and then suppress the trailing-edge flow separation, particularly during the downstroke process. Generally, double-row VGs are better than single-row VGs concerning controlling deep dynamic stall. This work also gives a performance assessment of VGs in controlling the highly unsteady aerodynamic forces of a wind turbine airfoil.


Author(s):  
Yogesh Ramesh Patel

This paper provides a brief overview of the research in the field of Fluid-structure interaction in Wind Turbines. Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) is the interplay of some movable or deformable structure with an internal or surrounding fluid flow. Flow brought about vibrations of two airfoils used in wind turbine blades are investigated by using a strong coupled fluid shape interplay approach. The approach is based totally on a regularly occurring Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code that solves the Navier-Stokes equations defined in Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) coordinates by way of a finite extent method. The need for the FSI in the wind Turbine system is studied and comprehensively presented.


2012 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 283-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
RI-KUI ZHANG ◽  
JIE-ZHI WU ◽  
SHI-YI CHEN

A new active control strategy for wind-turbine blades under off-design conditions has been investigated in this paper. According to our previous work, in comparison with the traditional straight leading-edge blade, a new kind of bionic blades with a sinusoidal leading edge can significantly enhance the turbine's power output at high speed inflows. However, the wavy leading-edge shape is unfavorable under the design operating conditions since an early boundary-layer separation is inevitable for a wind-turbine blade because of the geometric disturbances of the leading-edge tubercles. But for the present active control, the deflect in wavy leading-edge blades can be eliminated by introducing a series of small flat delta wings as the control units, since delta wings can also generate powerful leading-edge vortices. As a preliminary test, our numerical results show that, the shaft-torque fluctuation in the turbine's stall region can be improved from 27.8% for a straight leading-edge blade (no control) to 8.9% for the present active control; and by adjusting the control parameters, the control units nearly have not any negative effect on the blade's shaft torque under the design conditions. We believe that, as an auxiliary tool of the conventional control strategies, the present active control approach may be favorable to generate a more stable and more controllable power output for wind turbines under all operating conditions (even in the yawed inflows).


Author(s):  
M. R. Luhur ◽  
J. Peinke ◽  
M. Kühn ◽  
M. Wächter

The paper presents a stochastic approach to estimate the aerodynamic forces with local dynamics on wind turbine blades in unsteady wind inflow. This is done by integrating a stochastic model of lift and drag dynamics for an airfoil into the aerodynamic simulation software AeroDyn. The model is added as an alternative to the static table lookup approach in blade element momentum (BEM) wake model used by AeroDyn. The stochastic forces are obtained for a rotor blade element using full field turbulence simulated wind data input and compared with the classical BEM and dynamic stall models for identical conditions. The comparison shows that the stochastic model generates additional extended dynamic response in terms of local force fluctuations. Further, the comparison of statistics between the classical BEM, dynamic stall, and stochastic models' results in terms of their increment probability density functions (PDFs) gives consistent results.


Author(s):  
Alessandro Corsini ◽  
Alessio Castorrini ◽  
Enrico Morei ◽  
Franco Rispoli ◽  
Fabrizio Sciulli ◽  
...  

The actual strategy in offshore wind energy development is oriented to the progressive increase of the turbine diameter as well as the per unit power. Among many pioneering technological and aerodynamic issues linked to this design trend, the wind velocity at the blade tip region reaches very high values in normal operating conditions (typically between 90 to 110 m/s). In this range of velocity, the rain erosion phenomenon can have a relevant effect on the overall turbine performance in terms of power and energy production (up to 20% loss in case of deeply eroded leading edge). Therefore, as a customary approach erosion related issues are accounted for in the scheduling of the wind turbine maintenance. When offshore, on the other hand, the criticalities inherent to the cost of maintenance and operation monitoring suggest the rain erosion concerns to be tackled at the turbine design stage. In so doing, the use of computational tools to study the erosion phenomenon of wind turbines under severe meteorological conditions could define the base-line approach in the wind turbine blades design and verification. In this work, the authors present a report on numerical prediction of erosion on a 6 MW HAWT (horizontal axis wind turbine). Two different blade geometries of different aerodynamic loading, have been studied in a view to explore their sensitivity to rain erosion. The fully 3D simulations are carried out using an Euler-Lagrangian approach. Flow field simulations are carried out with the open-source code OpenFOAM, based on a finite volume approach, using Multiple Reference Frame methodology. Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible steady flow were solved with a k-ε turbulence. An in-house code (P-Track) is used to compute the rain drops transport and dispersion, adopting the Particle Cloud Tracking approach (PCT), already validated on large industrial turbomachinery. At the impact on blade, erosion is modelled accounting for the main quantities affecting the phenomenon, which are impact velocity and material properties of the target surface. Results provide the regions of the two blades more sensitive to erosion, and the effect of the blade geometry on erosion attitude.


1986 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 445-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Brochier ◽  
P. Fraunie ◽  
C. Beguier ◽  
I. Paraschivoiu

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