Numerical study of the effect of weather parameters on corona discharge performance in a horizontal axis wind turbine

In this paper, we present a numerical simulation for integrating active load control using corona discharge-based plasma actuators on the trailing edge of a wind turbine blade. Eulerian simulation is done on a 660 kW wind turbine blade with NACA 0012 profile. The electrohydrodynamic incompressible flow created between two electrodes using the combination of the EHDFoam solver with the BoyantPimpleFoam solver is carried out in the free and open-access OpenFOAM software. The results have been validated using numerical and experimental work. The effects of environmental parameters such as temperature, relative humidity and environmental pressure on the corona discharge process have been investigated. The results of this research showed that with the increase in temperature, humidity and pressure, the discharge process is decreased. The results show a 62% and 35% decrease in the average transfer momentum with an increase in relative humidity and temperature, respectively.