Dependency of Torque on Aerofoilcamber Variation in Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

Abstract

The advancements in the wind turbine technology specially associated with Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT), has been improved for last couple of years. This is due to extensive use of computational techniques. This paper investigates dependency of torque on aerofoil geometry by performing numerical simulation on Darrieustype VAWT with fix pitch blades. Coordinate points for aerofoil was generated using Java Foil software. Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) turbulence modelling was used for predicting the flow and efficiency of the three blades VAWT. The unsteady flow condition was considered to make simulation as realistic as possible. In order to visualize high strain flow and separation, we used two equation models i.e. k-ε with RNG. NACA 0012 aerofoil was used and camber variations were carried out for developing samples of aerofoil to check the enhancement in performance of VAWT. Results demonstrate the torque and power along with its coefficients. It has been investigated that the performance efficiency was significantly improved by changing the aerofoil camber, demonstrating highest torque with camber (C3) aerofoil and the least performance was observed using camber (C0).