Aerodynamic Performance of a Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine Operating with Dust-A Computational Study

The main purpose of this study is to develop an understanding of the aerodynamic performance of a horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) operating in a dusty environment, with various concentration of dust in the flow domain. The computational analysis was accomplished by the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code ANSYS Fluent 16.0. Initially, a user-friendly developed application was utilized for the optimum blade geometry special characteristics calculation. The design of the HAWT rotor and meshing of the computational domain follows. The moving reference frame (MRF) model was applied for the rotary motion of the blades, the dust was added in the computational domain by the discrete phase model (DPM) and SST k-omega turbulence model was enabled. The power output of the studied HAWT, operating in several dusty environments, was estimated and compared with the power output of a particular HAWT in clean air. The flow field around the HAWT rotor, including the contours of pressure, particles dissipation rate and erosion rate on both blade sides, are shown. In general, it is concluded that the operation of a HAWT in a dusty environment results in degraded performance, due to the particles deposition on the blades.