Numerical Investigation of Solidity for Cambered

Darrieus VAWTs
Analysis of Chord Length

Sayyad Basim Qamar, Isam Janajreh

Dept. Of Mechanical & Materials Engineering
Masdar Institute of Science & Technology
Abu Dhabi, UAE
ijanajreh@masdar.ac.ae; sqamar@masdar.ac.ae

AbstractWind energy technology has seen steady growth in the
energy market as a clean, renewable source of energy. This has
brought attention to areas with moderate wind energy potentials.
Darrieus type Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs) allows
capturing of this potential for energy production at a cost-
effective scale. To improve the performance of these turbines
their design needs to be modified. With better manufacturing
methods currently available cambered blades are being
investigated to improve the performance of these turbines. In
particular, turbine solidity is investigated in this paper due to
different chord lengths of the blades. The analysis is conducted
following high fidelity CFD modeling in unsteady, turbulent
regimes with a sliding/rotating mesh configuration to emphasize
the role of rotor blades interaction. The study showed that low
solidity turbines with cambered blades operate at low coefficients
of performance (CP) over a large range of tip speed ratios (TSRs).
High solidity turbines have much higher CP, but at smaller TSRs
and short range of TSRs. Medium solidity turbines are faced
with considerable interaction which compromises their operation
at TSRs as low as 1.
Keywords;VAWT, CFD, Camber, Solidity, Chord Length
I. INTRODUCTION
Clean, environmentally friendly energy is a necessity and
the prime concern for all human beings for the present and
foreseeable future. The departure from conventional fossil fuel
based energy production methods have allowed for a boom in
the renewable energy sector. At present, the renewable energy
market is dominated by three streams of energy production
technologies; hydropower, solar and wind energy. All three of
these technologies are, however, heavily dependent on location
and natural resources. Of these, wind and solar energy are the
technologies quickly gaining the market share due to their cost-
effectiveness at a variety of locations. Wind energy holds
special appeal as it shows reasonable potential all across the
globe.
However, with conventional horizontal axis wind turbines
(HAWTs), places with medium to low wind potential have
proven to be difficult to tap, due to the associated high capital
costs and low energy capacity. Vertical axis wind turbines
(VAWTs) have recaptured the interest of many organizations
and researchers globally, in an effort to harness the wind
energy potential across the globe. With the unique feature of
non-dependence on wind direction and the advantage of
scalability, VAWTs present an interesting alternative to capture
wind energy potential at a small scale effectively.
A popular variety of lift-based VAWTs are the Darrieus
turbines. These turbines rotate using lift generated by airfoil
shaped blades. Due to manufacturing difficulty, traditionally,
VAWT designs have relied heavily on symmetric airfoils.
However, with advances in modern technology and
manufacturing methods, interest has been growing in the use of
cambered blades for these VAWTs. Cambered blades display
non-zero lift coefficients at zero angle of attack as well as
relatively higher maximum lift coefficients compared to their
symmetric counterparts. These characteristics of cambered
blades cumulatively affect the performance of the turbine
during blade interactions. Initial work has been done by
Sengupta, Biswas & Gupta [1] and Chen & Kuo [2] and Beri &
Yao [3] on the difference between symmetric and non-
symmetric bladed high solidity VAWTs. This cited work
shows promising results in terms of improved self-starting and
dynamic performance of cambered VAWTs. Other work
reported the high level of blade interaction and suggests the
importance of the role of turbine solidity in improving the
performance of cambered VAWTs, El-Samanoudy, Ghorab &
Youssef [4] and Singh, Biswas & Mishra [5].
This paper aims to quantify the solidity effect on the
performance of cambered VAWTs. The chord length is
changed as the solidity parameter using high-fidelity CFD
modelling of these VAWTs. High fidelity simulations such as
those using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are
considered effective virtual wind tunnels allowing accurate
evaluation of the flow parameters and inferring the VAWT
performance. These have already been demonstrated to be
effective in modeling VAWTs, Mohamed [6]. A systematic
approach of using Reynolds Average Navier Stokes (RANS)
solvers have been shown to be effective in modeling of
VAWTs and correctly capturing their flow dynamics as
investigated by Howell, Qin, Edwards & Durrani [7] and Yao
& Yang [8]. The systematic approach for 2D CFD modeling of
VAWT systems described by Kanyako & Janajreh [9] is
adopted here for the current investigation.

978-1-5090-5713-9/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE

 II. PROBLEM SETUP at several rotor diameters away from the rotor to capture the
physical flow problem. The air flow is governed by the
A. Blade Design unsteady, incompressible, viscous Navier Stokes equations, i.e.
The blades selected for the study are variations of the (2), (3) & (4), [10]. As the flow is inherently turbulent due to
NACA4312 airfoil. Three different chord lengths are selected high attained Reynolds numbers (1E+05), the eddy viscosity
for the blades, namely: 0.2, 0.5 and 1m as shown in Fig. 1. This model is used for the turbulence, Reynolds stresses, closure (5)
affects the turbine solidity, according to (1). in conjunction with the standard wall function in the near wall
region. It is further represented by two transport equations for k
CN (6) and (7) as reported by Menter [11]. The unsteady term
S (1) accounts for the rotor rotation, in a time progressive
R rotating/sliding mesh relative to the fixed inner and outer
Where, Cis the chord length, N is the number of the blades domains, as shown in Fig. 3.
and R is the rotor radius. Using Panel code for airfoil analysis
lift coefficients for the 4312 blade compared to a symmetric ui
0 (2)
0012 blade of the same thickness are shown in Fig. 2. It clearly t xi
shows favorable individual performance of cambering.
ui ij
( u j ui ) gi (3)
t x j x j
u i u j
ij p ij ( ) uiu j (4)
x j xi

u i u j
uiu j t ( ) (5)
x j xi
k u j k
P k
t x j

( k t ) xkj (6)

x j

Figure 1: NACA 4312 airfoil with varying chord length u j

P 2
t x j t

( t ) xj 2(1 F )
k
(7)

Figure 2: Lift coefficients for NACA airfoils
B. Simulation Setup
The physical domain is as a cutaway section of the VAWT.
It includes a rotating rotor bounded by far field upstream,
downstream and side boundaries. These boundaries are placed
x j
1
x j x j
Where, is the density and u, v, w are the velocity
components. P and g are the pressure and gravitational
acceleration, and is the dynamic viscosity. It should be noted
that the nonlinear advective terms in the above equation are
adjusted to the prescriped sliding mesh/rotor motion. The
uiu j term is the Reynolds stresses and is modeled using the
mean ( u ) velocity via the common eddy turbulent viscosity
(5). , and t are the dynamic and turbulent viscosities.
A rotating mesh technique is used to capture the
instantaneous details of the flow. This is more accurate and
physically representative than the steady moving reference
frame method. The non-linear convective term (2), (3), (4), (6),
(7) is ajusted according to the prescribed rotor motion. Three
domains/blocks are used in the model: inner stationary, outer
stationary and rotating rotor domain that contains the airfoils.
O-type boudnary layer quad mesh is used to fit the aiurfoils
unstructured mesh for the domains.
 Figure 3: Problem Setup, topography and boundary conditions assignment

The rotor boundaries are meshed at high resolution and Where, is the angular velocity and R is the rotor radius
equal discretization to accurately solve for every degree of and V here is the incoming/far-field wind speed.
rotation. An average cell count of 200,000 was achieved for all
three configurations following seeral iterative meshing The instantaneous torque was evaluated and recorded and
attempts and flow sensitivity. The geometrical confiugration is used to generate the torque and performance coefficients; CT
listed in Table 1. and CP according to (9) & (10).
T
TABLE I. GEOMETRICAL CONFIGURATION CT (9)
1
2 V 2 R * A
Parameter
No. of Solidity
Chord Lengths (m) Radius
Blades T
Cp (10)
Values
0.2 3.333 3 0.18 1
2
V 3 R * A
0.5 3.333 3 0.45

1 3.333 3 0.90
Time steps for the simulation ranged in the order of 1E-04
to capture every degree of rotation accurately, ensuring
stability and consistency of the solution. High number of
iterations (in the order of 6E5) were used to ensure
convergence of the solution, while also maintaining the CFL
number within the stability and consistency criteria considering
the smallest mesh size within the blades boundary layer. A
pressure based solver was used with the SIMPLE scheme being
utilized for pressure-velocity coupling with an implicit
transient formulation scheme. The models were run at multiple
tip speed ratios (TSR) ranging from 1 to 7. This is
accomplished by fixing the incoming wind speed (10 m/s)
while varying the rotational rotor angular velocity () for each
run, as can be seen by (8). The pressure outlet is prescribed
with zero gauge pressure and slip walls are used at the free
stream velocity.
R flows past the turbine, mimicking the flow around a cylinder.
TSR ( )
V
Where, T is the torque and is the rotor rotational velocity, V
is the incoming wind speed and A is the swept rotor area
(2R*unit depth).
The solution was allowed to run and reach to a
consistent/stable state while achieving low continuity, x- and y-
momentum residual at each time step of 10E-05 order, and the
average torque (T) was evaluated over two consistent
revolutions of the turbine.
III. RESULTS & DISCUSSION
Velocity contour plots for the three different configurations
are shown at TSR 3 in Fig. 4.
From the velocity contour plots we can clearly observe the
solidity effect of the changes in chord length. As the solidity
increases with the chord length, the wake region becomes more
pronounced marking a low velocity zone as the rotor blocks out
more of the incoming free stream fluid velocity. One can also
observe the fluid speeding up on either side of the turbine and
an increase in this zone as the solidity increases and the fluid
(8)
 the largest range of operation. However, this occurs at much
lower performance compared to the higher solidity turbines.
The high solidity turbine offers the best performance, however
it is limited to a shorter range of operation. The medium
solidity turbine does not provide useful energy in the
conventional range for a lift-based VAWT, but does however,
c=0.2 show reasonable performance at sub-unity tip speed ratios. To
investigate the causes of such performance the vorticity
contours were analyzed and are shown in Fig.8.

c=0.5

c=1.0
Figure 4: Velocity contour plots at TSR 3

The torque was observed as a function of the moment

coefficient. The torque for the three configurations at TSR 3 Figure 6: CP plot for varying chord length
can be seen in Fig.5. The low solidity turbine exhibits erratic
behavior in certain sections of the rotation. It also maintains a
positive torque throughout the entire rotation. This allows it to
consistently produce a more stable torque output. The high and
medium solidity turbines demonstrate the characteristic
sinusoidal behavior of a VAWT. At TSR 3, the medium
solidity turbine fluctuates between negative and positive
torque, producing negative net power and suggesting that the
turbine is non-operational in this range (see Fig. 6). The high
solidity turbine displays a much larger torque than the other
two turbines and only crosses over to a negative torque for a
short duration in its rotation. This allows it to produce the
largest amount of energy out of the three configurations.

Figure 7: CT plot for varying chord length

From the vorticity plots, we can see different behavior for

each configuration. For the low solidity turbine, the vortex
formation forms in a helical manner but each vortex trail is
observed quite far away from each other allowing the blades to
complete their rotation, experiencing disturbance from the
wake only at confined small zones. These may be the cause for
the erratic behavior in the torque production mentioned earlier
as well. Also as the turbine has low solidity, the wake
penetrates into the turbine and contributes to a wake directly
behind the turbine itself.

Figure 5: Instantaneous torque plot at TSR 3

The torque (CT) and power (CP) coefficients were evaluated
for the three configurations. These are shown in Fig. 6 & 7. As
can be seen from these figures, the low solidity turbine offers
The wake formation in the medium solidity turbine displays
formation of multiple bands at high strength which regularly
interact with the blades of the turbine. This wake formation
also spills out behind the turbine despite its larger solidity
signifying its strength.

(1/s)
5.00E+01
c=0.2
2.50E+01
c=0.5
8.67E-05
c=1.0
Figure 8: Vorticity contour plots at TSR 3
For the high solidity turbine, most of the wake forms
around the turbine, similar to the flow around a cylinder. There
is wake formation inside the turbine but not strong enough to
escape the turbine solidity. The blades having a larger chord
length are also able to power through these wakes and still
generate significant power compared to the medium solidity
turbine.
The low solidity turbine maintains the same behavior at all
tested tip speed ratios. However, the high solidity turbine
displays high interactions at higher tip speed ratios, which
causes the turbine performance to drop. A vorticity contour
plot for the high solidity turbine at TSR 5 is shown in Fig. 9.
This shows the wake trapped in the rotor ring at high tip speed
ratio, constantly impeding the rotation of the blades and
therefore resulting in the poor performance of the turbine at
high rotational speeds.
Figure 9: Vorticity contour plot for high solidity VAWT at TSR 5
IV. CONCLUSION
This work focuses on the numerical high-fidelity simulation
of VAWTs with cambered blades. It systematically investigates
different chord lengths, and therefore, different turbine solidity,
for a 3 bladed NACA 4312 VAWT. The results show that the
low solidity turbine has greater operating range, but at the cost
of low overall performance. The high solidity turbine has much
greater performance (2.93 times that of the low solidity
turbine). However, it is only functional for a short range of
TSRs. The medium solidity turbine does not perform well at
TSRs greater than one and shows the poorest performance of
the three configurations. This behavior of the turbine sis
attributed to the interaction between the blades and the wakes
they form. The medium solidity turbine faces high interference
from the wake and thus has low performance, which is also the
case for the high solidity turbine at large TSRs. Therefore it is
evident that there is an optimal solidity performance value for a
given flow speed. Further analysis may reveal more insight on
the interplay of turbine solidity parameters, i.e. turbine radius
and number of blades. This would enable achievement of a
more comprehensive picture of the optimum configuration for
cambered VAWTs.
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