Transitional Effect on Turbulence Model for Wind Turbine Blade

This paper presents the computational predictions of NREL Phase VI rotor using SST Gamma Theta turbulence model. All models were performed using the commercial CFD software, ANSYS Workbench CFX. Exactly the same geometry as NREL blades was built. Around 14 million unstructured mesh elements and 3.7 million nodes have been applied during the simulation. To deal with the boundary effect, 18 inflation layers were constructed around the boundary wall. The comparison of torque and thrust between several turbulent models and the experimental data were performed. For the overall performance, a better agreement with the NREL Experimental data was obtained with SST Gamma Theta model. After these verifications, the first, second SST blending function and transition blending function for seven distinct wind speeds were performed. It has been observed that SST Gamma Theta method can simulate the transition effect appropriately.