Engineering Commons^™

Computational Fluid Dynamic Modeling And Analysis Of Small Scale Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines, Madeline Samuell

Honors Theses

As the demand for wind power grows the technology used to research and further develop wind power must become more sophisticated. Experiments are expensive and require high end test facilities; a commonly used alternative to experimentation are computational fluid dynamic (CFD) models of wind turbines. For this project Star- CCM+ a CFD software was used to determine the power generated by small scale horizontal axis wind turbines. The Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) equations were applied to the models in order to solve for the average flow. Though a variety of different types of simulations were used the focus was on …