Investigating of aerodynamic characteristics of vertical axis wind turbine models

Abstract

This dissertation consists of an improvement done on 120 mm chord length asymmetric airfoil NACA 2412 to get better performance of wind turbine. It covers two main parts. First came the theoretical part where the 3D airfoil NACA 2412 was drawn in ANSYS Fluent to extract its aerodynamic characteristics with an inlet stream velocity of 40 m/s, then four other airfoils were generated by combining the lower surface of the NACA 2412 airfoil with the upper surface of other airfoils whether four-digit or five-digit NACA airfoils. These airfoils underwent the CFD domain to extract the coefficients of lift and drag under the same boundary conditions applied on the original NACA 2412 airfoil. The airfoils have shown higher lift and that was the time to jump into the second part of the study that consisted of 3D printing with all the necessary steps to achieve the perfect surface for testing in a real wind tunnel to extract the same aerodynamic characteristics in real life experiment. The analysis of the experimental results has shown a close similarity to the theoretical ones where these profiles recorded a noticeable quality when it comes to lift coefficients as well as the lift to drag ratio.