Numerical Workflow for 3d Shape Optimization and Synthesis of Vertical-axis Wind Turbines for Specified Operating Regimes

The renewable energy sources such as wind energy maintain to increase in popularity since they are inexhaustible and pollution-free. The horizontalaxis wind turbine has been the most common type of wind turbines but due to recent increase in popularity of personal green energy solutions, Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT) are becoming more common. Besides two mayor rotor types of VAWTs the Darrieus and Savonius rotor there are also new types of promising VAWT designs which are a kind of blend between the Savonius and Darrieus ones. The “blending” is achieved in this paper by the B-spline based parameterization developed for generic VAWT blade shape optimization. Both single wind-speed and real-site operating conditions, specified by a given distribution of wind speed are considered. Developed computational framework enables optimizer to synthesize and evaluate both the Darrieus and Savonius types but also to invent new generic shapes for custom operating conditions. Approach enables the optimizer to apply the same shape parameterization with small number of parameters to all considered cases. The developed workflow consists of efficient geometry parameterization, genetic algorithm based optimizer and a computational fluid dynamics based simulator. The promising results of custom-shaped vertical axis wind turbines for given specific site are presented through the case studies.