Development of a New Aerodynamic Method for the Mechanical Characterization of a Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine

The aim of this work is to propose a new method for calculating the aerodynamic forces of wind turbine blades and the power developed by them. To this end, the blade element momentum, prescribed wake and free wake methods were compared for speed ranges from 5 to 20m/s. The two-bladed NREL PHASE IV wind turbine with profile S 809 was used as the physical model, with the polars extrapolated to 90° using the Viterna method and then extended from -180 to 180° using flat theory. The largest error in power output was 47% at 5 m/s using PVM, the second largest was 16% at 10 m/s using BEM, and the third largest was 13% at 10 m/s using FVM. In or-der to reduce the percentage error of the PVM, the phenomen of vortex core growth has been in-tegrated into this method. The error at 5m/s was reduced from 47% to 8.29%, and the maximum error of the modified method was 9.19% observed at 18m/s. The new method was then compared to the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equation from the literature for the same velocity range. The maximum error observed was 8% at 10m/s for the RANS and 9.19% at 18 m/s for the new method.