Numerical Simulation and Parametric Study of an Oscillating Twin-Wing Wind Generator

An airfoil that is heaving and pitching simultaneously may extract energy from an oncoming flow, acting as a turbine. The extracting energy from a flow is possible if the effective parameter in performance of turbine is selected properly. In this study, the theoretical performance of an oscillating twin-wing wind generator is investigated through unsteady two-dimensional laminar-flow simulations, using the commercial computational fluid dynamics code FLUENT. Computations By examining various geometric, motor, and slippery parameters and investigating the effect of each of these parameters, we present a mapping of power-extraction efficiency in the frequency and pitching amplitude domain for a NACA 0015 airfoil at a Reynolds number of 41000. Results of a parametric study show that motion-related parameters such as heaving amplitude and frequency have a strong effect on airfoil performances, whereas geometry parameters turn out to play a secondary role. A power extraction efficiency of 49% is reached by twin-wing parallel configuration. This configuration improve the efficiency by around 7% as compared to the single foil configuration.