Investigation of the stall delay of a 5kW horizontal axis wind turbine using numerical method

Abstract

In this paper, a three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is constructed to test a 5kW horizontal axis wind turbine HAWT that was designed using BEM method. It is found that the power coefficient of 0.38 determined by the 3D CFD model is higher than 0.34 obtained by the BEM method. The difference should be due to the stall delay in the rotation flow field of the wind turbine model, which was confirmed by the simulation results that the flow remain attached to the blade surface when wind velocity has reached 20m/s. The behaviours of the flow separation were also investigated under different wind speed in order to improve the performance design of the wind turbine blade.