Vertical axis wind turbine analysis and simulation

Wide scope of possible development and its diversified applications have made Vertical Axis Wind Turbines amongst the favorite and famous devices for the researchers to extract Wind Energy. These kinds of turbines being vertically oriented have advantage of producing electricity in any direction as it does not have to be pointed to the direction of wind. This thesis describes the strategy to develop (involving design and analysis) a 2D CFD model of Darrieus Vertical Axis Wind Turbines using a NACA 6409 airfoil. ANSYS Fluent was used to simulate the model and analyze the study. The RANS turbulence modelling plays an important role in this type of analysis. After studying the characteristics of various RANS models, the Transient SST model was chosen to carry out the study of the 2D-VAWT. The sliding mesh method is used for the simulation for which a rotating region is created in a large domain. Use of unsteady solver (Transient solver) is done to capture the dynamic stall phenomenon and the unsteady rotational effects. A very fine, high quality mesh is generated within the boundary layer of the airfoil in order to efficiently understand the near field effects and get the results accordingly. A rigorous work has to be done on the designing of the turbine sizing in order to achieve precise simulation of the whole setup. A complete procedure for designing and simulation has been explained further in this report