CFD analysis of 2D H-Type Darrieus Turbine (VAWT)

This course is designed to teach you Wind Turbine Unsteady CFD Simulation in most straight forward way!

In this course, you will learn to conduct URANS CFD analysis of Darrieus Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT). First you will get coordinates of NACA 0015 airfoil from website, which is base airfoil for this turbine. Then you will import it into design modeler and proceed with creating geometry of three blades along with domains for rotating and fixed regions. After that you will create high quality mesh in ANSYS meshing with emphasis on resolving near wall flow using find mesh in blade region with Y+ < 1. You will create refined mesh in wake region using body of influence option. After that you will setup problem in Fluent with appropriate boundary conditions, material properties, time step cell zone conditions, interfaces, solver settings etc. We will setup report definitions to monitor torque and based on that we will monitor convergence. You will initialize solution using hybrid method and solve the problem.
Once solution is converged, you will take data from stored torque vs time step and import into excel and average it to find out time average torque. From this torque you will find out the power and ultimately coefficient of power Cp.
Finally we will compare Cp from our FD with experimental data given in high quality research paper.
In short after this course, you will be able to conduct CFD simulation of VAWT and get the time averaged values such as torque and Cp to compare to experimental data! In this course it is shown that the error is only 1% in CFD results presented in course as compared to experimental data in given research paper.