Power-Curve Corrections for Horizontal-Axis Wind Turbine by an Improved Blade Element Momentum Theory

This paper proposes a correction method to improve the accuracy of traditional blade element momentum theory (BEMT) in predicting the mechanical power and power coefficient of horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) blade. In this paper, the traditional BEMT incorporated with the Viterna-Corrigan (VC) stall/stall-delay model is proposed to improve the accuracy of power-curve prediction, by which its applicability is thus enhanced. For verification of the proposed method, three distinct types of geometries of HAWT blades subjected to different operations are studied with outcomes compared with experimental data. Two different wind turbines developed by National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) were tested at constant rotational speeds in a full-scale wind tunnel to acquire performance data. As a comparative platform, another wind turbine designed by BEMT for this study was also experimented in identical environment but at variable rotational speeds. As expected, the results clearly indicate that the power-curve prediction is effectively improved by the proposed method especially in the stall region when compared with experimental data. Indeed, this study shows that the improved BEMT is an ideal means to accurately predict the power-curve used for designing an optimal HAWT rotor.