Progresses in application of computational fluid dynamic methods to large scale wind turbine aerodynamics

The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods are applied to aerodynamic problems for large scale wind turbines. The progresses including the aerodynamic analyses of wind turbine profiles, numerical flow simulation of wind turbine blades, evaluation of aerodynamic performance, and multi-objective blade optimization are discussed. Based on the CFD methods, significant improvements are obtained to predict two/three dimensional aerodynamic characteristics of wind turbine airfoils and blades, and the vortical structure in their wake flows is accurately captured. Combining with a multi-objective genetic algorithm, a 1.5 MW NH-1500 optimized blade is designed with high efficiency in wind energy conversion.