Numerical Modelling Of Wind-blown Sand Effects On 100KW Wind Turbine Blades

Due to the influence of climatic conditions, sand and dust occurs frequently in the Northwest of China. The normal operation of the wind turbine in the wind-blown sand movement would be affected, including the change of power generation and the sand abrasion of the surface material of wind turbine. The paper adopted the modified blade element momentum theory to establish 100KW Horizontal axis wind turbine blades model. Gas-solid two phase flow method is used to study the characteristics in the wind-blown sand movement, including the sand concentration on aerodynamic performance impact of wind rotor and the sand abrasion of the surface material of blades. This paper provides a certain reference value for the wind turbine engineering design and analysis. The main contents in this dissertation are as follows:1. On basis of the modified blade element momentum theory, taking into account the influence of blade tip and hub loss, a geometric model of 100KW Horizontal axis wind turbine blades is built, with a radius of 10m. NACA4415 is chosen as the airfoil profile. Using MATLAB software to get the chord length and torsion angle of each cross section, import the coordinates of the airfoil NACA4415 into the modeling software Solidworks.2. Fluent software is adopted to calculate the flow field of wind turbine rotor. Firstly, without regard to the wind-blown sand movement, calculate rotor power and rotor power coefficient under the rated conditions in pure wind field, the results have a small gap with design goals and the error is within 10%. Secondly, taking into account the influence of the sand phase, Mixture two-phase flow model is applied to analyze the change of the sand phase volume fraction on the influence of rotor power in several different wind speeds. The conclusion is that rotor torque and power increase along with the sand phase volume fraction, meanwhile the numerical results are greater than the pure wind condition.3. Discrete phase model is used to analyze the influence of large particle size of sand abrasion on the blades. Abrasion of sand particles with diameter of 0.2mm on the surface of blade is the worst, the abrasion position mainly concentrated in the leading edge of blades.The actual situation is that the abrasion position concentrated in the leading edge of blades, this dissertation’s results provides significant reference to prevent abrasion for the wind turbine in engineering.