A New Strategy for Analysing the Impact of Turbulence Intensity on a Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine Performances using a Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation

The manuscript presents a continuation of previous related work by the authors in the domain of the aerodynamic of Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) [1]. Firstly, an optimal model has been performed on the CAD-modeler CATIA® V5 software based on geometrical parameters already determined in [1], then ANSYS® Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code fluent has been used to investigate how the variation of the incoming flow Turbulence Intensity (TI) influences the performance of a HAWT. The work gives an overview of two cases studies; the first one consists in analyzing the HAWT performances while changing the turbulence intensity and the attack angle of the incoming flow and maintaining a constant flow velocity. The second one studies the HAWT performances with the variation of turbulence intensity and the velocity of the incoming flow for a constant attack angle. The obtained results indicate that, an increase of turbulence intensity from 0.5% to 25% causes a decrease of the turbine performance, such as the power coefficient is dropped from nearly 4% to 24% for the first case and by almost 2% to 15% for the second one.