An insight into the separate flow and stall delay for HAWT

The flow characteristics and the stall delay phenomenon of wind turbine rotor due to blade rotation in the steady state non-yawed conditions are investigated. An incompressible Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver is applied to carry out all the cases at different wind speeds from 5 m/s to 10 m/s with an interval of 1 m/s. CFD results turn out to agree well with experimental ones at incoming wind speeds below 10 m/s, though at 10 m/s some deviations exist due to the relative large flow separation and 3D spanwise flow over the suction surface of the blade. In the meanwhile, a lifting surface code with and without Du-Selig stall delay model is used to predict the power. A MATLAB code is developed to extract aerodynamic force coefficients from 3D CFD computations which are compared with the 2D airfoil wind tunnel experiment to demonstrate the stall delay and augmented lift phenomenon particularly at inboard span locations of the blade. The computational results are compared with the corrected value by the Du-Selig model and a lifting surface method derived data based on the measurements of the Unsteady Aerodynamic Experiment at the NASA Ames wind tunnel. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.