See

discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256463304

A detailed Aerodynamic Design and analysis of a

2D vertical axis wind turbine using sliding mesh
in CFD

Conference Paper · January 2011

CITATIONS READS

4 264

2 authors:

Naveed Durrani Haris Hameed Mian

Institute of Space Technology Northwestern Polytechnical University
25 PUBLICATIONS 448 CITATIONS 35 PUBLICATIONS 84 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Development of CFD/CSD coupling methodology View project

Fluid Structure Interaction View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Haris Hameed Mian on 09 August 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

49th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition AIAA 2011-541
4 - 7 January 2011, Orlando, Florida

A detailed Aerodynamic Design and analysis of a 2D vertical

axis wind turbine using sliding mesh in CFD

Naveed Durrani 1, Haris Hameed 2, Hammad Rahman 3 and Sajid Raza Chaudhry4

National Engineering and Scientific Commission, Islamabad, Pakistan

A number of CFD analyses have been carried out to evaluate various symmetric and cambered
airfoils for a standard three blade vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) in 2D having an outer
diameter of 2.75 meters. Effects of blade thickness, camber, turbulence intensity in the flow, time
step sensitivity, domain size, mesh independence and effect of different turbulence models are studied
to obtain the overall best design configuration. A detailed analysis is done for symmetric NACA
airfoils that are commonly referenced in the literature with 12%, 15% and 18% thickness along with
a suggested baseline thicker NACA0022 airfoil. The results are presented for TSR range from 1.0 to
4.0 and for a range of oncoming wind velocities from 6 m/sec to 14 m/sec. It is found that NACA0022
airfoil gives the best overall performance.

Nomenclature

 = cross section area

CD = coefficient of drag
CL = coefficient of lift
Cm = coefficient of moment
Cp = performance coefficient
Cy = force coefficient in the y direction
CFD = computational fluid dynamics
c = chord (m)
D = drag force (N), diameter of the wind turbine
dt = time step (sec)
Fx = X component of the resultant pressure force acting on the airfoil (N)
Fy = Y component of the resultant pressure force acting on the airfoil (N)
L = lift force (N)
ƍ = mass flow rate
r = radius of the wind turbine
T = time period (time taken for one complete rotation)
:
TSR = tip speed ratio (  )
t = time in seconds
V’ = freestream velocity (m/sec)
vawt = vertical axis wind turbine
D = angle of attack
T = azimuth angle
: = rotational speed (rad/sec)
U = density of air

1
PhD, Research Associate, AIAA member, email: ndurrani@gmail.com
2
Research Associate
3
Research Associate
4
PhD, AIAA member
1
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Copyright © 2011 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.
 I. Introduction
The struggle to explore the alternative energy resources has geared up with the depleting stocks of the fossil fuel
on the planet earth and an urge to reduce the greenhouse gases. The initiatives to switch to the wind energy are being
taken at the individual to governmental levels across the globe.
Historically the power of the wind has been used in sailing ships, for pumping water for irrigation purposes and
grinding the grains. At the beginning of the twentieth century, electricity came into use and windmills gradually
became wind turbines as the rotor was connected to an electric generator [1].
One global event that invigorated the interest in power generation using the alternative resources was the
oil crisis in 1973. Countries having their energy production dependant on imported coal, oil or gas see the wind
energy as a source for self reliance. Another major reason for shifting to the wind energy is the awareness of the
global warming with greenhouse effects. A UN resolution on global warming to reduce the green house gasses
supplemented with a joint declaration by world powers is another step towards the focus on green and renewable
energy. The power generation from the wind is environmental friendly in terms of zero emission of CO2 or other
related hazardous emissions. However, there are some important factors which dictate the cost of the electricity
generation from wind turbines. It includes the metrological statistics of the available wind speeds throughout the
year, cost of installation site including land, labor cost and power transmission cost etc.

Figure 1. Artistic visualization of a VAWT on a rooftop

A wind turbine starts rotating due to the transfer of kinetic energy from the oncoming air. This rotational
motion is converted into the mechanical energy through gearing mechanism attached with the rotating shaft and
subsequently converted into the electrical energy through generator box. The maximum energy will be extracted
through the impinging air if theoretically the wind speed is reduced to zero (extracting all the kinetic energy). In that
 
case the maximum available energy
 Uƍ ’ =  U ’ . ƍ is the mass flow rate and ’ is the freestream
velocity and U is the density of the air and A is the area of reduced wind speed or rotor swept area. It is evident that
available wind power is related with the cube of the wind speed. Hence, the speed of the oncoming wind has a vital
contribution in the available wind power. In practice, due to a finite blockage ratio, the wind speed is not reduced to
zero and, hence, a fraction of maximum extractable power is achieved. This fraction is represented in terms of power
2
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
coefficient, Cp. This power coefficient Cp is defined as the ratio of the power obtained and the maximum available
wind power. A theoretical maximum achievable limit of the Cp is given by Betz limit of Cpmax= 16/27 which comes
out to be 59.3%. Further details of Betz limit which is derived through 1-D momentum theory for an ideal wind
turbine can be found in different text books such as [1]. Hence, the ideal power output from a wind turbine can be

written as 
 U  ’ .
This work is continuation of our previous studies[7,8,9] in a quest for exploring different aspects of vertical
axis wind turbine which have not been delineated in the literature or have limited information.

II. Case Setup

A commercial software Fluent® is used for present simulation. The mesh is generated using the
preprocessor of Fluent, called Gambit®. The sliding mesh concept is used. Density based solver with unsteady mode
is selected for all the simulations. The “size function” option in Gambit is employed to have gradual mesh size
variation. Mesh details are as follows:

Table 1: VAWT mesh statistics for base line mesh

Mesh info – Base line VAWT

Type Cells Faces Nodes

Hybrid 54422 89116 32874

Table 2: VAWT mesh statistics for coarse mesh

Mesh info – VAWT (coarse)

Type Cells Faces Nodes

Hybrid 46855 76836 28161

Table 3: VAWT mesh statistics for fine mesh

Mesh info – VAWT (fine)

Type Cells Faces Nodes

Hybrid 58193 95430 35408

A. Domain size
The base line grid has inflow domain placed at 16 times the radius of the wind turbine in the upstream
dimension and 18 times the radius in the downstream dimension. The top and bottom boundaries are placed 12 times
the radius of the VAWT.

B. Boundary conditions
All the outermost boundaries are considered as the ‘pressure farfield’ boundary conditions in Fluent. The
zone housing the turbine blades is considered as the sliding zone with interface boundary condition. The surface of
the turbine has no-slip boundary condition. A boundary layer mesh is generated near the turbine (airfoil) to reduce
the numerical dissipation near the turbine surfaces for better computation of flow characteristics. The density based

3
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
solver is chosen with second order spatial accuracy. The variation in Yplus over the leading turbine blade surface is
observed to reach up to 30. A standard wall function is chosen for the turbulence model. The results presented are at
least after 7 complete cycles when flow has established itself and are averaged over three consecutive time periods
(T). The time step is chosen based on time step sensitivity and is taken as T/400 for the baseline case.
All the meshes, generated for the present simulation have a near wall structured mesh for the boundary
layer capture as shown in Figure 2-c. Further details about boundary conditions and formulation of solver and
turbulence model etc. can be found in Fluent © User's Manual[11].

a) Domain mesh

b) Zoom view of rotor region c) Zoom view of turbine blade

Figure 2 (a-c). Mesh details of baseline VAWT

III. Results

Generally, the wind turbines consist of blades connected with a shaft and generate the electricity by rotating the
shaft due to the oncoming air. If the rotating blades are connected with a horizontal shaft, the wind turbine is termed
as the horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT). Whereas, the wind turbine with the blades connected to a vertical shaft
is called as the vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT). In the present study, all the simulations are carried out in 2D and
effect of supporting arms, central shaft and three dimensionality in the flow are not considered. The very high aspect

4
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
ratio of the turbine blade (around 20) justifies the two dimensional simulation of the VAWT. Instead of lift and drag
coefficients, the results are compared for their compound effect through the coefficient of moment computed at the

Figure 3. Cm Vs Time for Grid independence study

VAWT centre.
Mesh statistics for the coarse, baseline and fine mesh are presented in Table 1-3. It is evident from figure 3 that
there is a little variation of the results from baseline and fine mesh. The coarse mesh results show some noticeable
variation. Hence, the baseline mesh was deemed sufficient for further analysis.
In order to get an optimized time step, the study was carried out to compare the moment coefficient with
different time steps. The time step was used as a fraction of the time period (T) of the VAWT. The effect of time
step ranging from T/100 to T/700 is presented in figure 4. It is observed that T/300 gives sufficient temporal
resolution.

Figure 4. Cm Vs Time for time step sensitivity study

5
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
 Figure 5. Cm Vs Time for solver order study (base line is second order)
The solver order is very important in the simulation. The cell centred approach is used in Fluent. Hence, the first
order solver is not expected to give good results for the rotating VAWT with sharply changing flow features. The
first order solver assumes the cell centred flow parameters to be same at the cell faces (piecewise constant).
Whereas, the second order solver interpolates the cell centred data to get piecewise linear values at the face centre. It
can be observed from figure 5 that the first order results are quite different from the second order solver results.
Hence, a second order solver is chosen for all subsequent simulations.

Figure 6. Cm Vs Time for domain size study

In order to ensure that the domain size is sufficient for the present simulation, results from a small and a large
sized domain were compared with the baseline grid. It is clear from figure 6 that the results from the small size
6
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
domain differ from the baseline and large size domain. However, the baseline and large size domain have similar
results. Hence, the domain size of the baseline grid is sufficient.
With the increase in turbulence content in the flow, the flow quality deteriorates and the output is expected to
decrease. The VAWT is expected to be installed at a variety of locations with greatly varying operating conditions.
In buildup areas, the flow turbulence can be more if the surrounding vicinity of the VAWT has a large topographic
variation. In order to study the effect of turbulence intensity, same flow conditions with just varying the turbulence
intensity were simulated as shown in figure 7. It is found that with the increase in turbulence intensity, the moment
coefficient drops or performance reduces.

Figure 7. Cm Vs Time for effect of turbulence intensity study (torque ripple)

For HAWT it was found that standard k-H model gave inaccurate results after flow separation in the previous
research done by Wolfe and Ochs[10].

Figure 8. Cm Vs Time for study using different turbulence models

Standard, RNG and realizable K-H turbulence models were studied to see their output for VAWT. In line
with the previous study [10], it was observed that the standard K-H turbulence model does not predict the flow
variables correctly. Instead, it under predicts the aerodynamic forces acting on the VAWT blades. RNG and

7
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
realizable K-H turbulence models give similar results. RNG model is selected as baseline for all subsequent
computations.
When vorticity magnitude contours of Standard and RNG k-H models were compared, it was found that RNG k-H
models predicted stronger vortices at the trailing edge of an aerofoil. In order to investigate the reason of this
anomaly, the turbulent kinetic energy and turbulence intensity were plotted for Standard, RNG and realizable k-H
turbulence models.

Realizable K-HH Turbulence model

RNG K-HH Turbulence model

Std K-HH Turbulence model

Figure 9. Left column : Line contours of turbulent kinetic energy (scale limited to a value of 20)
Right column: Filled contours of turbulence intensity (scale limited to a value of 400)
It is observed that much higher values of turbulence intensity and turbulent kinetic energy were generated
by the Standard k-H turbulence model resulting in considerably lower power output whereas, the Realizeable and

8
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
RNG turbulence models predicted the comparable results. RNG k-H turbulence model is used for the baseline
simulation.
Choice of an airfoil is a critical for the aerodynamic performance of any VAWT. Traditionally, symmetric 4-
digit NACA series airfoils have been used for VAWTs. Some previous research work on Darrieus-type VAWT used
NACA0012 [1]. A shift to higher thickness was done to use NACA0015 [2, 3] and NACA0018 [4, 5]. Although, with the
increase in thickness, the profile drag also increases, the thicker airfoil has structural benefits allowing it to operate
at wider rotational speed range. A base line case with wind velocity of 12 m/sec and TSR value of 2.5 was frozen for
comparison of performance coefficient of different airfoils used. Different symmetric as well as asymmetric airfoils
were evaluated at this frozen operating condition as presented below.

Figure 10. Effect of number of blades on Cp

The effect of using more number of airfoils with same chord length (different solidity) was also studied and
results are presented in figure 10. It is observed that three airfoils give an optimum overall power coefficient.

Figure 11. Shape plots of different cambered airfoils used in study

9
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
 Figure 12. Comparison of Cp of baseline NACA0022 with different cambered airfoils

The output from different cambered airfoils at the baseline condition is presented in figure 12. The baseline
NACA0022 gives the best performance.

Figure 13. Shape plots of different symmetric NACA airfoils from 12% to 32% thickness used in study
10
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
 Figure 14. Comparison of Cp for different symmetric airfoils varying in thickness

The effect of variation of thickness in standard 4-digit NACA airfoils at the baseline condition was studied and the
results are presented in figure 14. It is observed that the best performance was given by the airfoils with thickness
variation from 15% to 22%. However, this performance snapshot is at a single baseline condition. In order to get a
more definitive verdict, the performance has to be evaluated over a range of TSR for different oncoming velocities.
Four 4-digit NACA symmetric airfoils NACA0012, NACA0015, NACA0018 and NACA0022 were simulated for a
range of TSR from 1to 4 for different oncoming speeds.

Figure 15: Instantaneous wall Yplus of top side blade after completion of 10 complete

11
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
 Figure 16. Instantaneous pressure contours (left) and velocity magnitude contours (right)

Figure 17. Instantaneous vorticity contours (left) and zoom view of rotor region (right)

Most of the literature related with VAWT revolves around symmetric NACA0012, NACA0015 and NACA0018.
However, our simulations indicate that further increase in thickness is beneficial in terms of gain in performance
coefficient. Hence, further studies at 12 m/sec on-coming free stream winds speed was carried out for a TSR range
from 1 to 4.

Figure 18. Shape plots of four NACA airfoils used in detailed study

12
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
a)

b)
13
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
c)

d)

14
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
 e)
Figure 19 (a-e). Cp Vs TSR of selected symmetric airfoils at wind velocity of 6-14 m/sec

Effects of thickness change on the performance coefficient, Cp with the variation in TSR are presented in figure
13(a-e). The performance data based from this figure suggests that with the variation in rpm the relative
performance coefficient shows different output. However, the 22% thick standard NACA 4-digit symmetric airfoil
gives an overall best performance over a range of operating conditions.

IV. Conclusions

The NACA0022 taken as the baseline gives the best overall performance. Three blades give the optimum
performance as compared with different other symmetric and cambered airfoils studied for the baseline operating
condition. Standard K-H Turbulence model gives excessive dissipation in the flow as compared with Realizeable and
RNG K-H Turbulence model. First order approximation is not appropriate for the computation of the performance
coefficient.
In the last part of the present study, commonly used symmetric NACA 4-digit symmetric airfoils NACA0012,
NACA0015 and NACA0018 were focused along with the baseline NACA0022 airfoil. The results show that till
TSR 2, generally, the performance coefficient is proportional to the thickness. However, after that the performance
of 15% and 12% thick airfoils improve. The NACA0022 gives the best overall performance. Although the
NACA0012 gives a good performance at higher rotational speeds or TSR, it performance at lower rotational speeds
is quite low. NACA0015 gives the steady performance. NACA0012 and NACA0015 gives better performance at
TSR=4. Largest variation in Cp with the TSR is observed in NACA0012 which improves at higher rpm. The
vorticity and velocity magnitude contours show a complex trailing vortex wake interaction of the VAWT blades.
The wake from the rotor section is bifurcated to two main streams on the upper and lower side of the rotor. For the
three blades VAWT, the wake effects play an important role and effect the performance of the trailing airfoils.

15
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
 Acknowledgments

The support from National Engineering and Scientific Commission (NESCOM), Pakistan is acknowledged. The
first author was awarded overseas research scholarship (ORS) from University of Sheffield for his PhD studies and
is thankfully acknowledged.

References
1
Hansen, O. L. M., “Aerodynamics of Wind Turbines”, 2nd ed., Earthscan, London, 2008.
2
M. Marini, A. Massardo, A. Satta, “Performance of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines with Different Shapes”. Journal of
Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, 39, pp.83-93. 1992.
3
O. Agren, M. Berg, M. Lejion, “A time-dependent potential flow theory for aerodynamics of vertical axis wind
turbines”, Journal of Applied Physics 97, 104913,2005.
4
D. Vandenberghe, E. Dick, “A Free Vortex Simulation Method for the Straight Bladed Vertical Axis Wind Turbine”,
Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, 26, pp.307-324, 1987.
5
I.S. Hwang, S.Y. Min, I.O. Jeong, Y.H. Lee, S.J Kim, “Efficiency Improvement of a New Vertical Axis Wind Turbine
by Individual Active Control of Blade Motion”, Proc. SPIE, Vol. 6173, 617311 (2006); doi:10.1117/12.658935.
6
M.C. Claessens, MSc Thesis: “The Design and Testing of Airfoils for Application in Small Vertical Axis Wind
Turbines”, Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, 2006.
7
Hamada K, Smith TC, Durrani N, Qin N, Howell RJ, “Unsteady flow simulation and dynamic stall around vertical
axis wind turbine blades”, AIAA Aerodynamics Conference Reno, 2008.
8
Edwards, J., Durrani N., Howell R., Qin N., 2007, “Wind tunnel and numerical study of a small vertical axis wind
turbine”, 27th ASME Wind Energy Symposium, AIAA-2008-1316.
9
Howell, R., Qin, N., Edwards, J. and Durrani, N., “Wind tunnel and numerical study of a small vertical axis wind
turbine”, Renewable Energy, 35 (2). pp. 412-422. ISSN 0960-1481
10
E.P. Wolfe, S.S. Ochs, “CFD Calculations of S809 Aerodynamic Characteristics”, AIAA Aerospace sciences
Meeting, Reno, NV, 1997; AIAA-97-0973
11
Fluent User's Manual, Fluent Inc.

16
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

View publication stats