2D CFD Numerical Simulation Study of Aerodynamic Performance of H-Darrieus Rotor

The study of H-Darrieus rotor attracted considerable attention due to its environmental advantages among generating electricity from renewable energy source. However, this rotor present reduced aerodynamic efficiency. In the present study, two-dimensional (2D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of vertical axis H-Darrieus wind turbine (VAWT) rotor, characterized by a NACA0018 aerodynamic profile has been conducted using Ansys Fluent software. The air flow around three-bladed wind turbine has been simulated in order to improve the aerodynamic performance of this rotor. The numerical approach adopted consists on the resolution of unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (URANS) applying k-ω shear stress transport (SST) and k-ε Realizable turbulence models. The obtained results indicate a good agreement with the available experimental data in terms of the variation in the power coefficient (Cp) as a function of the tip speed ratio (TSR). Furthermore, the results affirm the superiority of the k-ω SST turbulence model over the k-ε Realizable model regarding Cp which takes maximum values of 36%, 38% and 35% for velocity U∞ equal to 10, 15 and 20 respectively, in the case of k-ω SST. This result is valid also for the velocity magnitude contours. A parametric study has been established based on the variation of the torque coefficient with the azimuth angle, for different values of velocity