Modeling the static and dynamic characteristics of a wind turbine airfoil and validation with experimental data

Abstract

Dynamic stall modeling remains one of the most difficult topic in wind turbine aerodynamics despite its long research effort in the past. In the present studies, comprehensive investigations involving CFD, engineering models and experimental data were performed within the joint collaborative work DSWind. Both static and dynamic characteristics of a pitching wind turbine airfoil under a turbulent boundary layer flow were considered. The results indicate that optimized time-accurate CFD calculations can serve as reference data for verifying the engineering models, which can be potentially used for tuning the models under different air flow conditions.