Aerodynamic Performance Analysis of Adaptive Drag-Lift Hybrid Type Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

Abstract

In recent years, with the continuous development of new energy, how to efficiently use wind energy has received more and more market attention. Due to cost advantages, the development of small wind turbines is accelerating. Among them, the design and research of the airfoil design and research of the lift vertical axis wind turbine has matured, but because of the aerodynamic characteristics of the lift airfoil structure, it is impossible to start itself at low wind speed, resulting in the waste of low wind speed energy. Although the drag wind turbine has good self-starting performance, the wind energy utilization efficiency in the high-speed state is inefficient. Each has its own unique shortcomings, which directly affects the marketization of small wind turbines. In order to solve these problems, this paper presents a drag-lift hybrid type wind turbine structure based on an NACA0018 symmetrical airfoil, which can adaptively change the blade shape. This design can keep the blade in the drag shape under static and low speed conditions, and adaptively change the lift shape with the increase of speed. In addition, through the research method of CFD numerical simulation combined with physical experiments, the proposed wind turbine design is studied and analyzed from multiple angles. At the same time, the “6DOF + dynamic grid” setting is used to study the influence of the opening angle factor of the drag-lift hybrid blade on the self-starting performance, and the study shows that the design of the drag-lift hybrid blade proposed in this paper has a higher self-starting torque and lower starting wind speed than the traditional lifting blade, and it is observed that the drag-lift hybrid blade has the best self-starting performance when the opening angle of the blade is 80°. At the same time, the problem of switching the blade morphology of the drag-lift hybrid blade is also analyzed, along with how to use the spring to control all this adaptively. In order to better analyze the advantages of the drag-lift hybrid design proposed in this paper, a wind tunnel test was also carried out using the physical model, and the relationship between the leaf tip speed ratio and the wind energy utilization rate was obtained, which intuitively showed the improvement of the wind energy utilization rate of the drag-lift hybrid design compared with the traditional lift blade.