NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF HORIZONTAL AXIS WIND TURBINE PERFORMANCE USING PLASMA-BASED FLOW CONTROL

Abstract

Wind turbine performance is quite important in the field of renewable energy. Hence, optimizing the performance of the wind turbine blade in the off-design points is quintessential to capture more energy. Our main objective is to computationally maximize the power of the base-line wind turbine at off-deign points using plasma actuator which has been demonstrated to be effective in several applications including flow separation and boundary-layer control. Eventually, after obtaining the new characteristics with actuation, the blade element momentum theory was used to evaluate the performance of the NREL wind turbine blade at different tip-speed ratios. Overall, the power was quantitatively increased by an overall percentage 32.7 % comparing to the base-line case at the off-design points which is quite good for energy