Abstract
HAWT aerodynamic performance prediction is of great significance for wind turbine design and operation. A semi-rigid wake model based on the vortex theory is developed to analyze HAWT aerodynamic performance in this paper. The calculating methods for steady flow and unsteady flow are presented and the computer programs in FORTRAN language are compiled. The FD2.7-500 wind turbine rotor aerodynamic performance considering wind shear, cross-wind and tower shadow is calculated. The calculation results of the HAWT rotor performance using vortex theory and classic blade-element/momentum theory are individually compared with the experimental data. The comparisons show that the vortex theory gives more accurate performance than the classic blade-element/momentum theory does. When the tip-speed ratio is higher than 8, i.e. in the range of high tip-speed ratios, the power coefficients calculated by the vortex theory show agreement with the experimental data, but those calculated by the classic blade-element/momentum theory diverge from the experimental curve.
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