Aerodynamic effects of compressibility for wind turbines at high tip speeds

In the present work two dimensional airfoil computations are used to investigate the effects of compressibility in the tip region of large scale wind turbines of 20 MW+ size. In the past application of incompressible CFD solvers have been wide spread for wind turbine aerodynamics, due to their efficiency and robustness at the near incompressible conditions experienced near the rotor center.

With the increasing size of modern wind turbines and the desire to approach high tip speeds, the incompressible assumption might be violated in the tip region of the turbine. To investigate the effects of compressibility and the possibility of correcting incompressible flow solutions using explicit compressibility corrections, a CFD study of 2D airfoil aerodynamics at conditions of a large scale wind turbine is performed.

The present study show that classical compressibility corrections can be successfully applied as a post-processing step to incompressible solutions, reducing the error in the predicted lift and drag to within a few percent for attached flow conditions where viscous effects are limited at Mach numbers upto 0.3.