Study of 3D Backwards Facing Step to Improve Wind Turbine Blade Performance

A thin layer of tape is typically applied to the leading edge of wind turbine blades for protection from wind, erosion, debris, etc. However, the addition of the thin layer creates a backward facing step (BFS) that is known to decrease the blade performance, which reduces the turbine's electrical power output. A novel tape design with serrated edges, termed 3D-BFS, was tested by the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and showed a 6-7% increase in power production relative to the traditional tape. In another study, our team tested the performance of the 3D-BFS in a wind tunnel via wake survey. The results showed that the 3D-BFS were able to produce strong coherent structures in the far wake region as well as reduced the drag relative to a traditional BFS. The current study looks to replicate the experimental results with computational methods to enable a search for new 3D-BFS configurations with the goal of finding an optimal configuration. This work uses a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package (Star-CCM+). This talk will compare the CFD and experimental results in addition to examining new parameters that were inaccessible experimentally.