Analysis of winglets and sweep on wind turbine blades using a lifting line vortex particle method in complex inflow conditions

Abstract

An in-house aero-elastic vortex code, called MIRAS, is used to investigate the aerodynamic performance of winglets and sweep on horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) blades in simple and complex inflow conditions. Previous studies using vortex codes applied to study winglets and blade sweep on HAWTs have typically not considered complex inflow conditions such as turbulent wind and shear. The reasons may include the absence of modeling capability, the computational cost associated with simulating long turbulent time series, and/or the computational cost associated with resolving the blade tips to a very fine level. A preliminary study is performed here, where the MIRAS code is applied on the NREL 5MW wind turbine with an arbitrary winglet shape and blade sweep. Results indicate that wind turbine blades with sweep or winglets might be better in performance compared to their straight blade counterparts.