Aerodynamic Simulations for Floating Darrieus-Type Wind Turbines with Three-Stage Rotors

Growing energy demand is causing a significant decrease in the world’s hydrocarbon stock in addition to the pollution of our ecosystem. Based on this observation, the search for alternative sorts of energy to fossil fuels is being increasingly explored and exploited. Wind energy is experiencing a very important development, and it offers a very profitable opportunity for exploitation since the wind is always available and inexhaustible. Several technical solutions exist to exploit wind energy, such as floating vertical axis wind turbines (F-VAWTs), which provide an attractive and cost-effective solution for exploiting higher resources of offshore wind in deep water areas. Recently, the use of the Darrieus vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) offshore has attracted increased interest because it offers significant advantages over horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWTs). In this context, this article presents a new concept of floating Darrieus-type straight-bladed turbine with three-stage rotors. A double-multiple stream tube (DMST) model is used for aerodynamic simulations to examine several critical parameters, including, solidity turbine, number of blades, rotor radius, aspect ratio, wind velocity, and rotor height. This study also allows to identify a low solidity turbine (σ = 0.3), offering the best aerodynamic performance, while a two-bladed design is recommended. Moreover, the results also indicate the interest of a variable radius rotor, as well as the variation of the height as a function of the wind speed on the aerodynamic efficiency.