Numerical Study of NACA0012: An Application of VAWT with CFD Tools

A significant increase of the energy generation techniques demands the application of computational resources to design the mechanical components and aerodynamic profiles of vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) to analyze and improve their energy efficiency. For this reason, experimental studies have been conducted to analyze NACA 00-series with symmetric blades under low and high Re conditions. In this research, the shape of the NACA 0012 airfoil is formed in a 2D computational domain to solve the Navier-Stokes equations and analyze the behavior of the airflow around the surfaces of the airfoil with ANSYS Fluent solver. A mesh independence study determined an optimal number of 12005 cells and 12250 nodes to conform the structured mesh. On the other hand, the convergence criterion equal to 1x10-5 and the fast data processing of structured meshes defined a regular grid to visualize the contours of the airflow velocity, the airflow pressure, and the turbulent kinetic energy for each angle of attack (AoA) of the airfoil. A good agreement between the numerical model and the experimental data demonstrated an efficient application of the CFD methodology to calculate the pressure coefficient, the drag coefficient, the lift coefficient, the pitching moment coefficient, and the Cl/Cd ratio with a high peak value close to AoA=10? for two Re equal to 17600 and 35200. A remarkable description of the flow wake generation was reached by the SKW, BSLKW, GEKOKW, SKE, and RKE with a better visualization of the vortex shedding between 10? to 20? AoA in the CFD model.