Author : P. Satyannarayana Murthy, T. Naveen Kumar and A. Vinutha

Wind turbines working in arctic environments suffer from power losses due to fall in efficiencies in the aerofoil blades when covered with ice. It is observed that icing hampers the performance of wind turbines. The performance of wind turbine is depend on the following parameters as mentioned atmospheric temperature, pressure, relative velocity of the blade and surface temperature of the blade. A two-dimensional, steady state computational fluid dynamic model is developed to investigate the effect of icing on the performance of wind turbines. In this study NACA 63415 aerofoil is taken for CFD analysis with a chord length of 1m. The aerodynamic characteristics of wind turbine blade are investigated using ANSYS Fluent CFD software. The model parameters such as maximum icing rate and maximum icing area ratio at different angle of attack are selected from the literature. An optimization study is performed to identify the maximum lift coefficient, drag coefficient and maximum lift to-drag ratio at different air flow rates of 6m/s, 12m/s and angle of attacks ±600. CFD analysis depicted a drop in lift and a rise in drag with actual angle of attacks because of ice accumulation.

Keywords: Wind turbine, ice accretion, blade aerofoil 63415, CFD

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.7, No.3 (June-2017)