Effect of Chord Length on the Performance of H-Darrieus Wind Turbine with NACA 4415 Airfoil

Abstract

The effect of chord length to the performance of an H-Darrieus Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) was investigated numerically. The turbine blade made of NACA 4155 airfoil. A set of governing equations has been developed. In order to incorporate the turbulence effect, k - epsilon model was adopted. A Computational Fluid Dynamic code has been used to solve the problem. The non-dimensional chord length of 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, and 0.5 are investigated. The contour velocity in the computational domain was plotted and discussed. By using the average velocity of the wind leaving the turbine, power coefficient is estimated. The results show that the power coefficient for non-dimensional chord length of 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, and 0.5 is 0.51, 0.57, 0.59, and 0.59, respectively. The conclusion here is that non-dimensional chord length strongly affects the power. Increasing the chord length will increase the coefficient power. However, there exists an optimum chord length it is 0.4. Thus, it is suggested to use the non-dimensional chord length of 0.4.