A preliminary study for designing wind turbine blades using Caribbean technology

Advances in computing technology have made computer simulation a relatively inexpensive avenue for modeling and design. Computational fluid dynamics has been increasingly used in the design of fluid interactive systems including wind turbine airfoils, This paper presents a comparative study, which is the first phase of an ongoing research project. A numerical code is used to analyze flow over wind turbine airfoils. This is done as a prerequisite step for the design, and optimization of airfoils for horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) rotors, which will be manufactured using available technology in the Caribbean. Grid convergence and independence analyses demonstrate the competence of the methods used. The simulation data agree well with the test data. Numerical solutions of pressure coefficients show an acceptable deviation from the test data.