Increasing Wind Turbine Efficiency by Reducing Tower Shadow Effect and Scouring Effect

This work is intend to minimize the tower impact on the turbine blade aerodynamics, structural behavior and the oscillating nature of the frequency so called tower “shadow effect”. A horizontal axis wind turbine always has some form tower support structure, either lattice or tubular structure. Smaller machines tend to be supported on lattice structure whereas larger once use cylindrical tubes, made of either steel or concrete. Both the type of structure offers resistance to the flow causing velocity and pressure fluctuations in the near vicinity of tower and this fluctuation is pronounced to certain region called wake region. The pressure and velocity deficit, unsteady vortex shedding causes 3p fluctuation or flicker effect and deteriorate power quality in connected power networks. Moreover, this causes a fatigue loading on the blades. Thus an attempt is made to minimize the turbine blade interaction with the wake region. CFD is found to be good technology that can be utilized to analyses and optimize such a kind of complex problems. Having greater amount of advantages over proto based experimental techniques; CFD is applied to understand the intricate insight of the problem.