Towards an airfoil catalogue for wind turbine blades at IDR/UPM Institute with OpenFOAM

A methodology to efficiently simulate wind tunnel tests of several airfoils with OpenFOAM has been developed in this work. This methodology bridges OpenFOAM capabilities with MATLAB post-processing in order to analyze efficiently the performance of wind turbine airfoils at any angle of attack. This technique has been developed to reduce the cost, in terms of time and resources, of wind tunnel campaigns on wind turbine blade airfoils. Different turbulence models were used to study the behavior of the airfoils near stall. Wind turbine airfoils need to be characterized for all possible angles of attack, in order to reproduce the real aerodynamic patterns during operation. Unfortunately, this situation is translated into a huge demand of wind tunnel testing resources, airfoil manufacturing and data post-processing. The high costs in terms of experimental measurements have encouraged many researches to elaborate airfoil catalogues by performing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. Results are compared with a testing campaign on wind turbine airfoils aerodynamics run at AB6 wind tunnel of IDR/UPM located at the campus Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Madrid, Spain), this tunnel being particularly suited for bi-dimensional applications. It is an open wind tunnel with a test section of 2.5 × 0.5 m, the turbulence intensity is under 3% at a Reynolds number of Re ≅ 5•105