| Summary: | 碩士 === 淡江大學 === 航空太空工程學系碩士班 === 100 === This study used computational fluid dynamics software, FLUENT, to simulate the aerodynamic performance of small horizontal wind turbines subject to different blade numbers (but with the same solidity). The blades were manufactured and placed in a low speed wind tunnel to measure the performance curves. The CAD software, Pro/ ENGINEER, was used to draw the blade models. NACA 4415 airfoil was used as the blade section. The blade models were feed into a three-axis CNC milling machine to manufacture blades for the wind tunnel experiment.
In numerical simulations, the blade models produced by Pro/ENGINEER were imported to a grid generator, Gambit, to generate unstructured grids. The grids were used by FLUENT to simulate the flow field and obtain the aerodynamic performance of wind turbines. A post-processing software, Tecplot, was used to prepare the final results.
The majority of the numerical results can be explained by two-dimensional blade element theory and can also be explained reasonably from aerodynamic view points. But some parts of the results cannot be explained satisfactorily. Further numerical and experimental investigations are needed to better understand these discrepancies.
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