Numerical Simulation of Aerodynamic Performance of Off-grid Small Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

Abstract

In this paper, a 2D off-grid small compact model of vertical axis wind turbine was established. The sliding grid technology, the RNG turbulence model and the Coupld algorithm was applied to simulate the unsteady value of the model's aerodynamic performance. Through the analysis on the flow field at difference moments, the rules about velocity fields, vortices distributions and the wind turbine's total torque were obtained. The results show that: the speed around wind turbine blades have obvious gradient, and the velocity distribution at different times show large differences in the computional domain. In the rotating domain vorticity is large. With away from the rotation domain, vorticity reduced quickly. In the process of rotating for vertical axis wind turbine, the wind turbine's total torque showed alternating positive and negative changes.