CFD MODELLING

ANSYS FLUENT has been used to establish a CFD model, which is a software used for CFD modeling. In this section, CFD modeling of NREL PHASE VI wind turbine blades has been performed. The computational domain and boundary conditions, mesh, turbulence model, solution method and convergence criteria used in the CFD modeling are presented in this section

Computational domain of airfoil, blade and their boundary conditions

The use of Ansys commercial software performs the construction of the computational domain and grid generation for S809 airfoil. It is widely accepted that the use of the C-shaped domain is quite dominated in 2D airfoil simulations [23-26]. So, the designed C-Shaped Domain, along with S809 airfoil and boundary conditions, are presented in figure 5.
From the previous work, it has been found that NREL PHASE VI is a two-blade turbine and it possesses 1800 periodicity and hence one blade is modeled while performing CFD analysis. However, in this study author is trying to investigate the performance of the NREL PHASE VI turbine by considering three blades., Due to the symmetric nature of a three-blade wind turbine, the domain is made for a single blade to reduce computational time and by using periodicity, the solution of flow simulation around one blade gets extrapolated to two other blades to visualize the complete rotor [27-29]. The domain follows the 120° radial stream tube design in which the velocity inlet is kept behind 12 m from the blade and maintained the arc of 12 m radius. Whereas, the pressure outlet is placed at 24 m from the blade and the outlet surface maintained the arc of 24 m radius. The top surface is also considered to be the inlet and exhibit the same velocity. The computational domain and boundary conditions for the wind turbine model are depicted in Figure 6.