Optimum Design of Blade Flaps for Improving the Power Generation of a Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine

Several types of trailing edge flaps have been designed in order to improve the aerodynamic performance of airfoils in different applications. However the need for complex mechanisms in the proposed designs has been one of the main obstacles on their application, especially in the case of wind turbines. In this research, a new type of add-on flap is presented and the effect of adding it to the blade of a HAWT and optimizing its location and length is investigated. The use of add-on flap is more cost-effective than other conventional methods since it does not need major modifications to the existing blades. The modified blade element momentum algorithm is used to calculate the generated power. For increasing the accuracy , the aerodynamic coefficients are obtained by numerical solution of the governing equations, while in most similar studies, traditional methods based on airfoil linear theory were used. The results showed that the modification made in the blade momentum element algorithm increased the accuracy of the solver while maintaining its computational speed. The selected base turbine in this research is T-U-Bert with a nominal power of 2 kW. Finally, to improve the power production of this turbine at wind speed of 10 M/S an optimal flap arrangement is introduced. The results show that the value of the base turbine power coefficient is increased from 0.29 to 0.41,