In the 1880s, Lilienthal discovered the specific shape from the bird’s wings, which inspired the airplane invention by Wright brothers. The lifting efficiency of the blades determines the effectiveness of rotor rotation to cause productive energy conversion from wind kinetics to rotor rotation, which leads to higher electricity generation from the drive unit.įrom the late eighteenth century, the curving surface geometry was discovered to be advantageous for lifting efficiency in windmill by Smeaton. For wind turbines, the airfoil shape of the blades influences the turbine power production. The airfoil is the geometrically shaped structure for mechanical force generation from the relative movement between the airfoil and surrounding airflow of the airfoil structures.
The smaller laminar separation bubbles and reduced stall regime of CFD simulations illustrate the desirable aerodynamics of the resulted airfoil. The boundary layer thickness and skin-friction coefficient values support the decreased drag of the optimized airfoil. The power velocity and annual energy production (AEP) curves show the performance improvement of wind turbine with the optimized airfoil. The optimized airfoil shows enlarged laminar boundary layer region in all flow regime with a higher aerodynamic efficiency and the increased gliding ratio (GR). The CFD simulation from OpenFOAM® with Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model showed the visualized airflow.
The power performance of turbine with optimized airfoil was calculated by using blade element method (BEM) in software QBlade. The genetic algorithm (GA) optimization interfaced with the flow solver XFOIL was used with multi-objective function. The advantages of laminar boundary layer expansion in airfoil of horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) blades are presented as well. You can specify the 4-digits for a NACA airfoil: maximum camber, camber position, and maximum thickness.This chapter describes the method of airfoil optimization considering boundary layer for aerodynamic efficiency increment. It is then located under Add>Mesh>NACA Airfoil.
This script is an add-on, so you can easily install it in the Add-Ons sections of the User Preferences. I even have the object’s name dynamically change depending on the options specified. It was actually quite simple, because Blender took care of replacing the object with the new one. I originally thought it would require some rigorous event handling, object deletion, and creation. I was very impressed by how well the Action>Settings flow worked, and how easy it was to have the object updated when the settings were changed.
Other than that, I haven’t created any utilities for Blender. I’ve done plenty of game engine scripting, and I once made a very simple script in Blender that added a curve.
This was my first “real” script in Blender. I eventually got that sorted out, and was able to start writing the script in Python. It took me some time to get the calculations right, because there was some calculus involved with mapping the thickness distribution to the camber line.
I haven’t given an update in awhile, but I’ve been working diligently on it.