Author : Srinivas G, Mahesha G T, Chethan K N and Arjun N

Blades are the most critical component of a wind turbine which is responsible for conversion of wind energy into kinetic energy. Aerodynamics is a science and study of physical laws of the behavior of objects in airflow and the forces that are produced by airflows. In the early stage, the research on wind turbine blade design was limited on theoretical study, field testing and wind tunnel testing which need a lot of efforts and resources. Due to the development of computer aided design codes, they provide another way to design and analyzed the wind turbine blades. Aerodynamic performance of wind turbine blades can be analyzed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which is one of the branches of fluid mechanics. In this paper an effort is made to study the Lift and Drag forces in a wind turbine blade at numerous sections and the effect of angle of attack on these forces. In this paper airfoil profile is considered for analysis of wind turbine blade. The wind turbine blade is modeled and several sections are produced from root to tip. The Lift and Drag forces are calculated at different sections for different angle of attack (AoA) for varied Reynolds numbers. The pressure and velocity distributions are also conspired. The cross sectional of blade is analyzed based on computational fluid dynamics to identify its suitability for its application on wind turbine blades and good agreement is made between conclusions.

Keywords: blade, airflow, aerofoil, pressure distribution, velocity distribution.

Article published in International Conference on Advances in Mechanical Sciences 2014, Special Issue-2 (Feb 2014)