Aerodynamic Design Improvement of Wind Turbines Performance by Boundary Layer Suction

Abstract

In the past decades the wind turbines were introduced as an alternative for the traditional energy sources due to the high prices of the fossil fuels and even to reduce the environmental impact of the CO2 emissions.However, the cost of energy for the wind turbines are still relatively high compared to the fossil fuels.Therefore, it was required to improve the aerodynamic designs to be competitive with traditional fossil fuel energy sources. The present work aims to design wind turbines with rated wind speed suitable for the average wind speed in Egypt, improving the aerodynamic performance of the blades by selecting unique airfoils and applying the boundary layer suction concept on the designed blades in trial to increase the power output and decrease the total cost of energy. During the present work many engineering tools was used to reach the optimum design starting with the XFOIL for the airfoils investigation and selection, MATLAB to create and program a code to reach the optimum blade design from the proposed airfoils, modifications of the designed blade for ease manufacture and then calculation of the net power output from the modified blade, and finally ANSYS 16 to simulate the turbine and calculate the power output and the other concerned parameters.