Steady and Unsteady Computational Analysis of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

This paper contributes to computational analysis of vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) with two and three straight bladed fixed pitch using NACA0018 airfoil at low wind speed. A moving mesh technique was used to investigate two-dimensional steady and unsteady flow around NACA0018 airfoil modified to be flexible at 150 inward and outward from the main blade axis at the trailing edge located about 70% of the blade cord length using fluent solving Reynolds average navier-strokes equation. The simulation result shows that both two and three blades have shown self-starting at low TSR with three blades having greater starting torque.