2nd National Conference on Advances in Heat Transfer and Fluid Dynamics, March 23-24, 2013

Numerical Simulation of an Airfoil Design Suitable for Small Vertical Axis Wind
Turbine
Ramniwas Bishnoi
Department of Mechanical Engineering, NIMS University, Jaipur, 302021, India
E-mail: ramn.bishnoi@gmail.com
Abstract: Indias new emphasis on multi-dimensional development of non-conventional energy is an open economy,
for the growing energy need of more than 1000 million people may accelerate rapid utilization of available nonconventional sources of the energy. The search for alternative energy sources and technology that can help tap energy
from sources hitherto not in use, has become especially relevant in the wake of the energy crisis in the rural sector.
Straight wing vertical axis wind turbines (SWVAWT) seems favourable option due to the fact that they do not suffer
from frequent wind direction changes and can utilize wind energy from low wind density regions. These small wind
turbines can be very effective in rural communities for farm management and irrigation. The most important aspect of
SWVAWT is their aerodynamic effectiveness, the base of which is the design of the airfoil forming the blades. The main
objective of this paper is to develop an airfoil design for straight wing vertical axis wind turbine for minimum wind
velocity 2 to 3m/s. To utilize both lift and drag force, a design of airfoil is developed. Using a commercial computational
fluid dynamics solver such as Fluent, Simulation is performed for this airfoil at different angles of attack ranging from 00
to 3600. The fluid domain is meshed using an unstructured grid, was adequately thickened in order to detect correctly the
strong variations of the flow parameters in domain and at boundary layer zone had a special treatment. For detailed
turbulence calculations K- turbulence model is used.
Keywords: airfoil; straight wing vertical axis wind turbine; K- turbulence model; drag and lift.

Introduction:
Wind exists everywhere on the earth, and in some places with considerable energy density. India has great
potential for wind energy and nowadays, wind power has become a promising source to generate electricity because wind
power is clean, quiet and efficient. It reduces acid rain, smog and pollutants to the atmosphere. The theoretical maximum
power efficiency of any design of wind turbine operate in open atmosphere is Ce = 0.59 - the Betz Limit (Manwell, J.F.,
2002; Mathew, S., 2006). The real-world limit is well below the Betz Limit with values of 0.35 - 0.45 common even in
the best design wind turbines. Except this one there are other energy losses in a complete wind turbine system (the
generator, bearings, power transmission, etc.) and only 10% -30% of the power of the wind is ever actually converted
into usable electricity.
The wind turbine generators use mainly aerodynamic lift force and drag forces acting on the surfaces of blades.
Today researches are stating that horizontal axis wind turbines (lift force design) theoretically have higher power
efficiencies than vertical axis wind turbines (drag force design). However, other research state that at conditions of
turbulent with rapid changes in wind direction practically more electricity will be generated by vertical turbines, despite
its lower efficiency. However, VAWT have number of substantial advantages over HAWTs (Sandra et al. 2008), such as:
The VAWT has no need to constantly yaw into the local wind direction.
Due to the relatively lower rotational speed, VAWTs are typically quieter than HAWTs.
The manufacturing cost for a very large VAWT could be lower than that for an equivalent HAWT due to the
simpler straight constant section blades compared to the complex three-dimensional blade shape in HAWTs.
The VAWT is also mechanically better able to withstand higher winds through changing stalling behaviour,
offering a potential operational safety advantage during gust conditions.
Straight wing vertical axis wind turbines (SWVAWT) seems favourable option due to the fact that they need low
self starting torque (Bishnoi, R.N, et al, 2013; Healy, 1978) and can utilize wind energy from low wind density regions
of minimum wind velocity of 2-3 m/s. These small wind turbines can be very effective in rural communities for farm
management and irrigation.
Considerable improvements in the understanding of VAWT can be achieved through the use of CFD (Islam et al,
2008) and experimental measurements. This paper aims at studying the effect of changing the design of airfoil on the
performance of the straight wing vertical axis wind turbine with fixed pitch angle through CFD simulations.

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Airfoil design
To utilize both lift and drag force, this airfoil is designed other than conventional airfoil designs.

Figure:1 J-airfoil design

Computational method:
J-airfoil shown in Fig.1 was selected as blade section. The airfoil was set to 120mm chord length and turbine
radius was set to 500mm. For creating 2D model and mesh of the model, Gambit modelling software was used. The
domain was set as shown in Fig.2 with a rotating sub-domain surrounding the blades and stationary sub domains in the
remaining region. Mesh for the rotating and central sub-domains were generated with triangular blocks and enough
thickened near airfoil boundaries to measure flow small flow variations.
The model and mesh generated in gambit modelling software were read into the commercial CFD code, fluent 6.2.23 for
numerical iterative solution. The RANS equations were solved using the green-gauss node based gradient option and the
sliding mesh method was used rotate the sub-domain for the turbine blades. For pressure-velocity coupling, the SIMPLE
algorithm was used. Standard was set as pressure discretization and first order upwind was set for momentum. Time
integration was done implicitly and the minimum convergence criteria were set to 1e-06. The RNG k- model was
adopted for the turbulence closure.

Figure:2 Boundary conditions

The boundary conditions are shown in Fig.2. The inlet was defined as a velocity inlet, which has constant inflow
velocity while the outlet was set as a pressure outlet, keeping the pressure constant. The velocity at the outlet was
determined by the extrapolation from inside. The no slip shear condition was applied on the turbine blades, which sets
the relative velocity of blades to zero. There were four domains in the computational domain with 71012 cells in of the
meshes. The cells were concentrated near the blades for better result. The Reynolds number based on rotor diameter was
218,000 and the blade chord length Reynolds number was 22400.

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2nd National Conference on Advances in Heat Transfer and Fluid Dynamics, March 23-24, 2013
Table 1: Grid sensitivity analysis
Number of cells

Lift Coefficient (CL)

Airfoil 1

Airfoil 2

Airfoil 3

49452

0.11139

0.14757

-0.02993

54328

0.14743

0.15891

-0.02624

71012

0.14986

0.15884

-0.02578

Figure:3 Overall view of the mesh

Figure: 4 Rotating sub-domain

Figure: 5 Mesh near the airfoil

For moving mesh simulations, the computational sub-domain is split into a moving part around the turbine and a
fixed part for the fixed environment. The rotational motion is simulated by allowing the mesh block around the wind
turbine to rotate at constant velocity. The mesh movement is defined explicitly by specifying time-varying positions for
all of the moving mesh block cell vertices. An interface boundary surrounding the moving mesh part with in model slides
at the specified velocity. This represents the relative motion between the rotating wind turbine and the fixed environment.

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2nd National Conference on Advances in Heat Transfer and Fluid Dynamics, March 23-24, 2013
Figure 3 shows the overall view of the 3-bladed turbine model mesh and Fig. 4 shows the zoom-in view around subdomains. As can be seen from Fig. 5 and, the cells were concentrated near the blades for better results. Figure 5 shows
the cells around the blades.
The flow condition used for the analysis is shown in Table 1. Time step size was set corresponding to 2 degree for
each rotational speed of the rotor () given in Table 1 corresponding to each TSR. Eighty iterations were used per time
step.
The operating speed of the turbine, expressed as Tip speed ratio (TSR) was set between 0.5 and 1.5.
TSR is defined as:
TSR = R./V
Where, R is the turbine radius, is angular velocity and V is the free stream velocity.

Result and Discussion:

Figure 6 shows simulated average torque values at lower TSR which was the main focus area of the study. It
shows the avergae torque in N-m for complete revolution of the modeled turbine for TSRs 0.5 and 1.5. The torque values
were obtained from coefficient moment (Cm) of the modeled turbine, air density, area of turbine, free stream velocity
chosen and the radius of the turbine modeled.

TSR

Table 2: Flow conditions

Angular velocity
Wind velocity (m/sec) (rad/sec)

Time step size

(sec)

0.5

1.5

0.0116345

0.75

2.25

0.0077565

0.0058175

1.25

3.75

0.0031826

1.5

4.5

0.0017591

Figure: 6 Torque for TSR 0.5 and 1.5

Figure: 7 Blade position at time = 0.00e+00, Angle = 0o

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Figure 7 depict blade position at stationary stage of turbine. The pressure contours at four different positions change
of angle for one complete turn of the turbine are shown with the help of figures. The snap shot pressure contour
distributions were taken for TSR 1.5 and turbine was modelled to turn anticlockwise. Figure 8, 9, 10 and 11 shows
pressure contour at different angles (0, 90, 180 & 270 degrees) of turbine in one revolution.

Figure:8 Pressure contour for TSR = 1.5 at time = 0.00e+00, Angle = 0o

Figure: 9 Pressure contour for TSR = 1.5 at time = 7.4e-02, Angle = 90o

Figure: 10 Pressure contour for TSR = 1.5 at time = 1.48e-01, Angle = 180o
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2nd National Conference on Advances in Heat Transfer and Fluid Dynamics, March 23-24, 2013

Figure: 11 Pressure contour for TSR = 1.5 at time = 2.22e-01, Angle = 270o

Conclusion:
The CFD analysis of J-airfoil design in SWVAWT is carried out. The governing equations of fluid flow are solved
in commercial CFD solver. The result of torque at TSR = 1.5 found more than 5 N-m at 3 m/s (low) wind velocity. Self
starting capabilities of turbine are improved. These SWVAWT can be very effective for small applications as noise
emission will very low at rated speed of rotation. In India for irrigation and farm management purpose these types of
wind turbines are more suitable. Results from wind tunnel testing of this turbine model will be compared with CFD
results in future scope of this work.

References:
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Beri. H, Yingxue Yao, 2011. Effect of camber airfoil on self starting of vertical axis wind turbine, Journal of
Environmental science and technology 4(3): 302-312, 2011.
2. Bishnoi, R.N, et al, 2013. CFD simulation and analysis of J-airfoil design for vertical axis wind turbine, page 188194, proceeding in FTiME 2013.
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