Performance of buoyant shell horizontal axis wind turbine under fluctuating yaw angles

Arslan Saleem and Man-Hoe Kim

Energy, 2019, vol. 169, issue C, 79-91

Abstract: The paper presents the effect of fluctuating yaw angle and wind speed on the performance of a horizontal axis airborne wind turbine of three different shell shapes for the high altitude operational conditions. For this purpose, a numerical analysis has been performed by considering the ranges of yaw angle and wind speed of 0°−20° and 10m/s−25m/s, respectively. The turbine shell shapes are based on the three aerofoil profiles of NACA-5415, NACA-9415 and NACA-5425 to investigates the influence of the aerofoil camber and thickness. The turbine has been modelled using a NREL Phase IV rotor with the fixed rotor radius of 2m for all shell configurations. A 3-D numerical analysis has been conducted by implementing k−ω SST turbulence model to solve the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. Numerical results demonstrated that the increment in both the tip speed ratio and yaw angle augmented the rotor thrust coefficient. At the high yaw angles, the buoyant shell is prone to encounter instability due to unbalancing of the aerodynamic forces subjected to the shell body. Among all the studied shell configurations, the NACA-9415 aerofoil based shell displayed the relatively higher turbine power coefficient as well as the stable operation.

Keywords: Buoyant airborne turbine; Aerofoil based shell; Performance coefficients; Shell aerodynamics; Yaw angle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544218323910
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:169:y:2019:i:c:p:79-91

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2018.12.025

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().