Five Megawatt Wind Turbine Power Output Improvements by Passive Flow Control Devices

Unai Fernandez-Gamiz, Ekaitz Zulueta, Ana Boyano, Igor Ansoategui and Irantzu Uriarte
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Unai Fernandez-Gamiz: Department of Nuclear and Fluid Mechanics, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Nieves Cano, 12, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Ekaitz Zulueta: System Engineering and Automation Control Department, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Nieves Cano, 12, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Ana Boyano: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Nieves Cano, 12, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Igor Ansoategui: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Nieves Cano, 12, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Irantzu Uriarte: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Nieves Cano, 12, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

Energies, 2017, vol. 10, issue 6, 1-15

Abstract: The effects of two types of flow control devices, vortex generators (VGs) and Gurney flaps (GFs), on the power output performance of a multi-megawatt horizontal axis wind turbine is presented. To that end, an improved blade element momentum (BEM)-based solver has been developed and BEM-based computations have been carried out on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) 5 MW baseline wind turbine. The results obtained from the clean wind turbine are compared with the ones obtained from the wind turbine equipped with the flow control devices. A significant increase in the average wind turbine power output has been found for all of the flow control device configurations and for the wind speed realizations studied in the present work. Furthermore, a best configuration case is proposed which has the largest increase of the average power output. In that case, increments on the average power output of 10.4% and 3.5% have been found at two different wind speed realizations. The thrust force and bending moment in the root of the blade have also been determined and compared with the values of the clean wind turbine. A residual increase in the bending moment of less than 1% has been found.

Keywords: wind turbine power; vortex generators (VGs); gurney flaps (GFs); flow control; blade element momentum (BEM) model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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