Modelling of a wind power turbine

Abstract

Due to the predicted scarcity of the fossil fuels and their adverse effects to the environment, currently renewable energy generation is a major focus of the power and energy sector. Wind energy is one of the potential and rapidly growing sources of green energy. This is particularly due to the cost of the wind energy production has reduced by a factor of more than five over the last two decades. Moreover, wind turbines can cover a wide range of power outputs from 50 W to 5 MW and beyond compared to other green energy sources. This study is aimed to model a horizontal axis wind power turbine theoretically and computationally. Initially, theoretical calculations were carried out by considering a few specific case studies with different power outputs. Then, the same case studies were considered for a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. Theoretical results show that the modelled wind turbine reaches a power output of 4.4 MW. Moreover, the theoretically calculated thrust and torque show a good agreement with the values obtained from CFD with a deviation of 2.9% only which confirms the accuracy of results. Therefore, the findings of this work should be useful in investigating ways to improve the performance of horizontal axis wind turbines.