A 3D WIND TURBINE SIMULATOR FOR AERODYNAMICS EDUCATION

The energy production and performance of wind turbines is heavily impacted by the aerodynamic properties of the turbine blades. Designing a wind turbine blade to take full advantage of the available wind resource is a complex task, and teaching students the aerodynamic aspects of blade design can be challenging. To address this educational challenge, a 3D software package was developed as part of the Mixed Reality Simulators for Wind Energy Education project, sponsored through the U.S. Department of Education's FIPSE program. The software is suited for introductory wind energy courses and covers topics including blade aerodynamics, wind turbine components, and energy transfer. The simulator software combines a 3D model of a utility-scale Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) with animation, a set of interactive controls, and a series of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of an airfoil under a number of conditions. Students can fly around the wind turbine to view from any angle, adjust transparency layers to view components inside the nacelle, adjust a cross-section plane along the length of a blade to view the details of the blade design, and manipulate sliders to adjust variables such as angle of attack and Reynolds number and see contour plots in real-time. The application is available for download at www.windenergyeducation.org, and is planned for release as open source.