Abstract—Renewable energy is the energy extracted from the natural resources like wind, rain, etc. Since wind power is growing at a rate of approximately 30% annually and now it has the capacity to generate 430 TWh annually, which is about 2.5% of worldwide electricity usage. Although a variable source of power, the intermittency of wind seldom creates problems results wind power to supply up to 20% of total electricity demand. Thus, much research is focusing to utilize this vast adequate wind resource because the evolutions of serious problems like air pollution which leads to global warming due to the consumption of more conventional fossil fuels, coal and nuclear energy resources. The study on the effect of aerofoil thickness in wind turbine blades is one of the effective methods to improve its performance. In this paper numerical simulation was carried out to study the effect of aerofoil shape using commercially available CFD software. The main scope is to increase the resultant force produced by each blade which is resolved as Lift and Drag. Lift is an aerodynamic force on the body in the direction normal to the flow direction, while Drag is an aerodynamic force on the body parallel to the flow direction. For a windmill to operate efficiently the lift force should be high and drag force should be low. In this work NACA 4415 is chosen as a wind turbine blade cross section. From this basic configuration thickness of the cross section is changed and the effect of thickness is studied through lift curve slope.

Index Terms—Wind turbine blades, Aerofoil thickness, Numerical simulation, CFD software

Cite: S Prathiban, M Manickam, P Renuka Devi, and T T M Kannan, "Effect of Aerofoil Thickness over Pressure Distribution in Wind Turbine Blades," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol.3, No.4, pp. 564-572, October 2014.