Cascade Effects on Circular Arc Airfoils for Windmill Analysis

Date
2013-07-16
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Abstract
Water-pumping is one of the oldest uses of wind energy with the multi-bladed, high-solidity windmill still in widespread use. For the present, solidity can be taken as the projected area of the blades as a fraction of the circular swept area of the rotor. Windmills rotate slowly and have very high solidity, making their aerodynamic analysis fundamentally different to that for modern wind turbines. The main difference addressed in this thesis is solidity effects on blade lift and drag in the expectation that windmills can analysed by a modification of standard blade element theory which assumes that the blades behave as airfoils. Circular arc airfoils were computationally modelled by using the well-known shear stress transport - transition (SST- transition) model in FLUENT to study the solidity effect on lift and drag at Reynolds number of 100,000. The transition model constants were adjusted in order to match measured pressure distributions on isolated circular arc airfoils. The cascade calculations shows that ratio of the lift and drag ratio which measures the performance of the windmill changes significantly with increasing solidity which implies that it should not be neglected in evaluation of windmill performance.
Description
Keywords
Energy, Engineering--Aerospace, Engineering--Mechanical
Citation
Fagbenro, K. A. (2013). Cascade Effects on Circular Arc Airfoils for Windmill Analysis (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25220