Study the effect of suction flow control on the aerodynamic performance of a wind turbine using 2D section numerical Results

In the present work, the numerical investigation of a wind turbine airfoil with suction flow control is initially performed to find the relative improvement in its erodynamic efficiency. Consequently the study of turbine performance is accomplished using 2D simulation results as extending the flow control to wind turbine blades. The latter is incorporated via definition of new input data file in Q-blade code including complete set of section aerodynamic coefficients for both with and without suction control against variety of angles of attack and velocities. The benchmark turbine in this study is NREL 5 MW. It is shown that using suction in 1/3 of chord length would lead in better enhancement. Simulation of the airflow with and without suction control has been presented in three different locations in the chord-wise direction (26%C, 33.5%C and 50%C) and for several intensities or suction speed ratios (0.022, 0.045, 0.11, and 0.155). The turbulence model is transitional 4-equation SST model. The aerodynamic improvement in section is dominant and this method could tolerate stall behavior. Wind turbine power and thrust coefficients were analyzed via Q-blade versus tip speed ratio and flow control parameter. The range of tip speed ratio studied here is 3.5 to 15. The results depicted that applying suction in certain part of the blades could increase output power at low tip speed ratio. Applying suction at 33.5% of chord length improves the average power coefficient by 4.1%.