Wind Turbine Enhancement via Active Flow Control Implementation

The present research enhances the efficiency of an airfoil section from the DTU-10MW Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) via Active Flow Control (AFC) implementation and when using synthetic jets (SJ). The flow around two airfoil sections cut along the wind turbine blade and for a wind speed of 10 m/s is initially simulated using the CFD-2D-RANS-Kω-SST turbulence model, from where the time-averaged boundary layer separation point and the associated vortex shedding frequency are obtained. On a second stage of the paper, and considering one of the two airfoil sections, the boundary layer separation point previously determined is used to locate the SJ groove as well as the groove width; the three remaining AFC parameters, momentum coefficient, jet inclination angle, and jet pulsating frequency, are parametrically optimized. Thanks to the energy assessment presented in the final part of the paper, the study shows that a considerable power increase of the airfoil section can be obtained when attaching the former separated boundary layer. The extension of the optimization process to the rest of the blade sections where the boundary layer is separated would lead to an efficiency increase of the HAWT. The Reynolds numbers associated to the respective airfoil sections analyzed in the present manuscript are Re = 14.088×106 and Re = 14.877×106, the characteristic length being the corresponding chord length for each airfoil.