A Computational Aerodynamics Simulation of the NREL Phase II Rotor

The work presented in this article aims to the calculation of the aerodynamic characteristics of the NREL phase II rotor that is a horizontal axis downwind wind turbine rotor and which is assumed to stand isolated in the space. The Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations combined with the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model that describes the three dimensional steady state flow about the wind turbine rotor are solved with the aid of a commercial CFD code. A structured grid of approximately 3.3 million cells formulates the computational domain. The numerical results for the considered wind turbine rotor are benchmarked against wind tunnel measurements obtained at free stream velocity of 7.2m/s in the framework of VISCEL project. The comparisons show that the used CFD code can accurately predict the span-wise loading of the wind turbine rotor.