EUROMECH 2012 - Springer April 2, 2011
Authors: O. Eisele, G. Pechlivanoglou

The focus of the present investigation is to evaluate the capability of modern state of the art codes to simulate the aerodynamic behavior of typical wind turbine airfoils. Two airfoils were selected. The AH93-W-174 [1] with a thickness of 17.4% as a representative for relatively thin airfoils in the outer region and the relatively thick DU 97-W-300 [8] with a thickness of 30% as a representative for rather thick airfoils in the inner region of wind turbine blades. The third test case was a multi-element configuration composed of the DU-97-W-300 as the main airfoil and a slat based on the NACA 22 airfoil. For all configurations aerodynamic simulations with different levels of complexity were accomplished. First simulations were carried out with the panel code XFOIL and the Euler code MSES. Furthermore steady state RANS computations were conducted by the use of the open source code OpenFOAM.