Aerodynamic Optimization Design And Application Study Of Wind Turbine Airfoil

With the increasing problems of energy shortage and environmental pollution,wind energy,as the renewable energy with abundant reserves,has been widely concerned in recent years.The blades,the core components of wind turbines to obtain wind energy,are stacked with airfoils with different chord lengths and twist angles.The high-performance airfoils could contribute to the aerodynamic efficiency of the wind turbine.Therefore,it is of great importance to study efficient special airfoils and blade design theory to improve their performance.In this paper,the traditional airfoils are taken as the research object.This paper combines airfoil parametric modeling and adaptive genetic algorithms to search for high-performance optimized airfoils.The airfoils are applied to blade design and aerodynamic analysis.The main research work is as follows:(1)Based on Fluent,the aerodynamic numerical analysis model of NACA4412 airfoil is established in this paper.And the applicability of the model is verified by comparing the experimental data of wind tunnel.The effects of turbulence model,Reynolds number,angle of attack and other factors on lift-drag characteristics,pressure distribution and flow field of the airfoil are studied.(2)The accuracy of the CST method and the improved Hicks-Henne function method on the traditional airfoils shapes of NACA63418 and NACA63421 are compared.Due to the high reliability of the XFOIL aerodynamic calculations,the automatic calculation of aerodynamic characteristics of the airfoil is realized by MATLAB coupled XFOIL.(3)For airfoils with different spanwise positions of blades,the above NACA63 series airfoils are first modelled parametrically using the improved Hicks-Henne function method.Then according to their operation characteristics and design requirements,the shape parameters and design variables of the airfoil are constrained.And then,the high-performance optimized airfoil is searched by adaptive genetic algorithm calling XFOIL software.Through quantitative analysis,both optimized airfoils have improved aerodynamic performance.(4)Due to the overall performance of 3MW wind turbine,the basic parameters of blades are determined.Based on Wilson theory,the chord length and twist angle of each blade element are calculated and then corrected.A 3MW wind turbine model is built using GH-Bladed software and combined with optimized airfoils.The blades with optimized airfoils are more suitable for low-speed operation.