Numerical study on a single bladed vertical axis wind turbine under dynamic stall

The aim of this study is to investigate the flow development of a single bladed vertical axis wind turbine using Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods. The blade is constructed using the NACA 0012 profile and is operating under stalled conditions at tip speed ratio of 2. Two dimensional simulations are performed using a commercial CFD package, ANSYS Fluent 15.0, employing the Menter-SST turbulence model. For the preliminary study, simulations of the NACA 0012 airfoil under static conditions are carried out and compared with available measurement data and calculations using the boundary layer code XFOIL. The CFD results under the dynamic case are presented and the resulting aerodynamic forces are evaluated. The turbine is observed to generate negative power at certain azimuth angles which can be divided into three main zones. The blade vortex interaction is observed to strongly influence the flow behavior near the blade and contributes to the power production loss. However, the impact is considered small since it covers only 6.4 % of the azimuth angle range where the power is negative compared to the dynamic stall impact which covers almost 22 % of the azimuth angle range.