Designing a Wind Turbine Rotor for High Reynolds Number Wind Tunnel Experiments
Open Access
Author:
Forrest, Joshua
Area of Honors:
Aerospace Engineering
Degree:
Bachelor of Science
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Mark A Miller, Thesis Supervisor Kenneth Steven Brentner, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Wind Energy Aerodynamics Reynolds Number
Abstract:
Wind Energy has become an affordable and broadly accessible renewable energy technology that could provide a significant portion of the world’s energy in the future. Wind turbine experimental testing is important for their continued development. It provides validation cases for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and is faster and less expansive than running utility-scale tests in existing wind farms or test sites. However, current wind tunnel experiments with wind turbine rotors do not scale appropriately for direct comparison to utility-scale turbines. Wind tunnel experiments are run at blade-chord Reynolds numbers orders of magnitude below that of utility wind turbines to maintain incompressible flow and match rotor Tip speed ratios. Penn State’s upcoming high-pressure wind tunnel facility will reach 500 PSI, which allows for blade-chord Reynolds numbers 34 times that of wind tunnel tests in atmospheric pressure, the same order of magnitude as utility-scale wind turbines. This work seeks to design and optimize a model Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) rotor for future experiments in the facility investigating the near-wake of HAWTs and loading effects for yawed flow cases.
