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Enhancement of the Conventional Wind Turbine Performance using Multi-Rotor Configuration
Journal
AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition, AIAA SciTech Forum 2022
Date Issued
2022-01-01
Author(s)
Prajapati, Malhar
Shukla, Dhwanil
Abstract
Various designs of the rotor blades, their dimensions and configurations of the rotors are being tested for the wind turbines in order to produce increasingly efficient and economically competitive energy. Rotor wake recovery effects can be leveraged in the multirotor wind turbines for increasing power generation in wind turbine farms. Here, the wake of a multirotor wind turbine is compared with a single rotor wind turbine with the same frontal area, tower height and tip Reynold’s number. An OpenFOAM-based transient RANS solver has been setup to determine the power generation of a given wind turbine configuration for a fixed incoming wind velocity. The results show that the NREL Phase VI Wind Turbine’s multirotor configuration with 0.5D tip distance gives 9% increase in power generation compared to a single rotor configuration for nearly the same thrust force. The effects of interaction and wake recovery have been studied by comparing velocity deficit and vorticity plots. The comparison echoes benefit of using multirotor configuration compared to conventional single rotor configuration for wind turbines.