Renewable Energy xxx (2014) 1e12

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Renewable Energy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/renene

Integrated airfoil and blade design method for large wind turbines
Wei Jun Zhu*, Wen Zhong Shen, Jens Nørkær Sørensen
Department of Wind Energy, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper presents an integrated method for designing airfoil families of large wind turbine blades. For a
Received 27 September 2013 given rotor diameter and a tip speed ratio, optimal airfoils are designed based on the local speed ratios.
Accepted 23 February 2014 To achieve a high power performance at low cost, the airfoils are designed with the objectives of high Cp
Available online xxx
and small chord length. When the airfoils are obtained, the optimum flow angle and rotor solidity are
calculated which forms the basic input to the blade design. The new airfoils are designed based on a
Keywords:
previous in-house designed airfoil family which was optimized at a Reynolds number of 3 million. A
Integrated design method
novel shape perturbation function is introduced to optimize the geometry based on the existing airfoils
Airfoil and blade design
Rotor aerodynamics
which simplifies the design procedure. The viscous/inviscid interactive code XFOIL is used as the aero-
dynamic tool for airfoil optimization at a Reynolds number of 16 million and a free-stream Mach number
of 0.25 near the tip. Results show that the new airfoils achieve a high power coefficient in a wide range of
angles of attack (AOA) and are extremely insensitive to surface roughness. Finally, a full blade analysis
using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and blade element momentum (BEM) technique proves the
reliability of the integrated design method.

2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. Introduction blade to operate with a high power performance. However, wind

The earliest work on airfoil design began in late 19th century
that mainly using the potential flow theory. In the past century, a
large number of airfoils were designed with various design goals.
Due to development of computer technologies, many numerical
tools were developed and used for airfoil optimization instead of
using the flat plat theory for airfoil design. Hicks et al. [1] are one of
the earliest aerodynamicists who made the airfoil design by nu-
merical optimization. The design work of wind turbine airfoils were
initiated by Tangler and Somers [2,3] resulting in a family of NREL
airfoils dedicated to wind turbine blades. As one of the most pop-
ular airfoil families used in commercial blades, the DU airfoil family
[4] was designed with low roughness sensitivity. For more details
about the effect of surface roughness, the reader is referred to Ref.
[5]. More recently, researchers at RISØ and DTU have made signif-
icant contributions in designing wind turbine airfoils [6e9]. All
these wind turbine airfoils meet the demand of high lift to drag
ratio around design lift and some of them are designed for low
noise emission [9].
The state of art in wind turbine airfoil design is to achieve a high
aerodynamic performance that ensures the designed wind turbine
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: wjzh@dtu.dk (W.J. Zhu).
turbine blades designed with these airfoils do not necessarily
operate in an optimum state because of the separated design of the
airfoil and blade. More rigorous wind turbine blade design needs to
be integrated with specific airfoil design. Recently, Sartori et al. [10]
presented their work on investigating the potential of a 2D airfoil
and 3D blade integrated design approach. The airfoil shape is
described with 3 points that increases the computational efficiency
but also limits the accessible airfoil geometry. In the design loop,
XFOIL is used for 2D airfoil simulation and the power coefficient of
the blade is computed using the previously obtained 2D lift and
drag. With the integrated design methods, the goal of maximizing
annual energy product (AEP) can be better achieved by coupling an
airfoil optimization routine together with the blade element mo-
mentum (BEM) theory or other similar numerical tools. The inte-
grated method increases the design complexity and addresses
more issues than separated design methods. The success of an in-
tegrated design work, however, requires a sufficiently elaborated
optimization tool. This paper provides a starting point for such an
integrated design optimization.
The core of the present optimization work is to develop large
wind turbine blades in order to reduce cost of energy (COE). To
achieve this goal, new airfoils are designed and employed at spe-
cific blade radial positions. At the specific local blade stations, the
design objectives of the airfoils are high power coefficients and
small chord lengths. Beside these objectives, various constraints are

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2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

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Nomenclature k weighting coefficient [e]

MN free stream Mach number [e]
a axial velocity induction factor [e] Pu,l shape modes [e]
a0 tangential velocity induction factor [e] r local radius [m]
B number of blades [e] R rotor radius [m]
c chord length [m] Re Reynolds number [e]
cd drag coefficient [e] vr, vq, vz velocity components in polar frame [m/s]
cl lift coefficient [e] V0 wind speed at inflow [m/s]
CLde design lift coefficient [e] V1 wind speed at wake [m/s]
CLmax maximum lift coefficient [e] Vq azimuthal wind speed [m/s]
cl/cd lift-to-drag ratio [e] x local speed ratio [e]
Ct tangential force coefficient [e] yþ dimensionless wall distance [e]
Cn axial force coefficient [e] X, Y, Z Cartesian coordinate system [m]
Cp power coefficient of an airfoil [e] a angle of attack [ ]
Cpclean power coefficient of an airfoil with clean surface [e] b blade twist angle [ ]
rough
Cp power coefficient of an airfoil with rough surface [e] l tip speed ratio [e]
dT thrust element [e] f local flow angle [ ]
dM torque element [e] s rotor solidity [e]
F tip loss correction [e] u, U rotor angular speed [rad/s]
g, x, h exponents of the shape function [e] Dyu,l shape perturbation functions [e]

imposed, such as surface roughness sensitivity, maximum lift to been used as a key reference number during the design process
drag ratio, etc. The objectives and constraints are different at [11]. According to the momentum theory, the solution of the power
different cross-sections due to their different local flow conditions. coefficient is maximized when the axial induction factor is a ¼ 1/3,
In the state of variable speed operation, the flow geometry over the although advanced computations show that the maximum power
rotor is preserved such that the flow angle is maintained at its efficiency is obtained at a slightly higher axial induction than a ¼ 1/
optimum position. The blade platform designed in this paper en- 3 [11]. The power coefficient of an annular element of a rotor disc
sures that the blade will have optimum flow geometry such that the can be written as
axial induction factor approaches 1/3. The optimum flow geometry
will not be guaranteed if the blade is designed with other airfoils udM
Cp ¼ : (1)
because these airfoils are not dedicated to such a blade. Ideally, a 1=2rV03 dA
perfect rotor can be designed using the integrated method, i.e.,
construct the blade with airfoils specially designed and use the From the classical BEM method, the torque acting on a blade
resulting optimal blade platform. It is worth noting that the element is written as
objective of the present design is to maximize the local power
1 V0 ð1  aÞurð1 þ a0 Þ
coefficient at selected blade radial positions. Therefore, only 2D- dM ¼ rB cCt rdr: (2)
BEM computations are involved in the design stage which reduces 2 sin f cos f
the design complexity. Without introducing 3D-BEM iterations into Therefore the power coefficient for a blade element is obtained
the optimization loop, the computational efficiency is highly from Eqs. (1) and (2), such that
increased. The method of using 2D-BEM for optimization is
described in the next section. ð1  aÞu2 r 2 ð1 þ a0 ÞBcCt ð1  aÞx2 ð1 þ a0 ÞsCt
The present design aims at exploring the integrated method for Cp ¼ ¼ : (3)
2pr sin f cos fV02 sin f cos f
airfoils and rotor baseline platform design. In the end, five airfoils
are designed with relative thickness between 18% and 30%. Thicker
where a and a0 are the axial and tangential induced velocity
airfoil design is beyond the scope of the present work and will be
interference factors, respectively, x is the local speed ratio, Ct is the
considered in the future. Validations are performed against 3D-
tangential force coefficients, s is the rotor solidity and f is the local
BEM and CFD rotor simulations.
flow angle.
The paper is organized as following: Section 2 describes the
From the trigonometric relation, the following equation exists
integrated design method; Section 3 presents some features about
airfoil design; Section 4 illustrates the results of the optimized
1 tan f
airfoils; Section 5 shows the numerical validations of the optimum sin f cos f ¼ sin 2 f ¼ : (4)
rotor; Conclusions are given in the final section.
2 1 þ tan2 f
The relative velocity seen from a blade section is a combination
of axial flow velocity (1  a)V0 and the rotational velocity(1 þ a0 )ur.
2. The integrated design method
This gives the flow angle in the rotor plane

The integrated design of airfoil family and blade is initiated by ð1  aÞV0 ð1  aÞ

carrying out a BEM analysis of an airfoil section at a given blade tan f ¼ ¼ : (5)
ð1 þ a0 Þur ð1 þ a0 Þx
station. The core of the analysis is the iterative computation of the
power coefficient of the airfoil, and since the power performance is Inserting Eqs. (4) and (5) to Eq. (3), the power coefficient of a 2D
an important measure of the efficiency of a rotor blade, it has often airfoil section reads,

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h i ratio x, the length of blade R, the number of blades B and the airfoil
2
Cp ¼ ð1  aÞ2 þ x2 ð1 þ a0 Þ xCt s (6) normal and tangential force coefficients. To compute Ct and Cn, the
lift and drag coefficients from the airfoil aerodynamic computa-
with a ¼ 1/3, the solidity can be written as tions are needed in every iteration of airfoil optimization, such that

.
s ¼ 2Fsin2 ðfÞ Cn (7) Ct ¼ cl ðsin f  cd =cl cos fÞ (10)

where Cn is the axial force coefficient and F is the Prandtl tip loss
function.
It is known that the Prandtl tip loss function corrects the
assumption of the disk model. Thus for rotors with a finite number
of blades the correction has to be implemented to the blade design
as well as to the airfoil design. Various tip loss functions can be used
for such design purpose, one of the simplest corrections proposed
by Prandtl reads:
 
F ¼ 2 cos1 ef =p (8)
where
f ¼ BðR  rÞ=ð2r sin fÞ (9)
In Eq. (6), not all of the variables have been explicitly given
except for the axial induction factor that must equal to 1/3. As an
idealized design case, the wind shear, turbulence, yaw/tilt and
rotational effects are neglected. The other parameters can be
divided into two groups. Parameters in group 1 contain the values
that will not enter into the BEM iterations. These are the local speed
Cn ¼ cl ðcos f þ cd =cl sin fÞ: (11)
The other group of the variables will be iteratively solved due to
their dependency. These parameters are the power coefficient Cp,
the local flow angle f and the tangential velocity induction factor a0 .
The values of Cp, f and a0 are initialized with zero before the first
BEM iteration. After several iterations, the highest Cp of a blade
section at the given flow condition is obtained.
The geometric parameters in group 1 shall be fixed for a given
blade design. In the present study, we take the 5 MW reference
wind turbine [12] as the reference rotor. This reference wind tur-
bine has a maximum rotational speed of 12.1 RPM and the blade
length of 63 m. In this task we are going to design a wind turbine
rotor with a rated power above 20 MW. Therefore the length of the
new blade can be approximately estimated
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
R ¼ 63m 20MW=5MW ¼ 128m: (12)
According to the reference rotor, in the present work we fix the
blade length at R ¼ 130 m and the tipespeed-ratio (TSR) to be equal
to 8.

Airfoil Shape Generation

Call XFOIL

Cl & Cd x, R, r, B

BEM Model Iteration c(x), ϕ(x) of

Eqs. (1-11) optimal rotor

Cp(x), σ(x) Other Constraints

Optimizer

N/Y End

Fig. 1. Flowchart of the integrated design.

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Fig. 1 shows the flowchart of the integrated design process. To previous airfoils. The shape perturbation function used for the
start the optimization, an initial airfoil is read into the model ‘Airfoil upper surface is
Shape Generation’. After each iteration, new airfoil geometry will
replace the previous one. The generation of a new airfoil will be X
N

described in Section 3.2. The second step is ‘Call XFOIL’ in which the
Dyu ðiÞ ¼ fu ðkÞPu ðk; iÞ (13)
k¼1
aerodynamic properties of the given airfoil are calculated. This in-
cludes calculation of lift and drag coefficients at various angles of and for the lower surface it is,
attack under clean and rough surface conditions. The main loop is
the airfoil shape optimization with the 2D-BEM iteration being X
N
inside the main loop. The connection between the resulting airfoil Dyl ðiÞ ¼ fl ðkÞPl ðk; iÞ: (14)
lift, drag and the blade design is ‘BEM Model Iteration’, which was k¼1
already introduced in Eqs. (1)e(11). One input to this model is the
In Eqs. (13) and (14) the subscripts u and l stand for the upper
airfoil data obtained from XFOIL, and the other input is the infor-
and lower airfoil surfaces, respectively, i is the index of the x and y
mation from rotor blade, e.g., local TSR, total blade length, local
coordinates, k is the index of the shape modes. The shape functions
radius, number of blade etc., denoted as ‘x, R, r, B’, respectively.
for each mode along the x-coordinate are
Some key values are iteratively computed by the model ‘BEM Model
 
Iteration’. Typically, after several BEM iterations the values ‘c(x),
Pu ðk; iÞ ¼ sinx pxu ðiÞgðkÞ (15)
f(x)’ of an optimal rotor and the corresponding ‘Cp(x), s(x)’ of the
airfoil section are found. It is worth noting that these optimal values
 
are updated while a new airfoil is generated during the optimiza- Pl ðk; iÞ ¼ sinh pxl ðiÞgðkÞ : (16)
tion. The design objectives Cp and s are the input to the ‘Optimizer’.
The optimizer iteratively searches the optimal Cp and s values until The amplitudes fu and fl in Eqs. (13) and (14) are the design
the final airfoil shape is found. In the present work, five airfoils at variables, and with the two exponents of x, h, the total number of
different spanwise positions are designed. The final optimal rotor is design points is dofs ¼ 2*N þ 2. g is a given vector which is the
found when the airfoil optimizer finds a converged solution at each exponent of x. For example, the choice of g could be g ¼ [0.1 0.2 0.3
blade spanwise position. 0.5 1 3 5 8]. Because xu,l˛[0,1], Eqs. (13) and (14) are equal to zero at
the leading and trailing edge points. Therefore leading edge and
3. Airfoil design features trailing edge coordinates are naturally fixed without being
perturbed.
Before starting the design work, two key parameters are pre- Fig. 2 shows an example of the shape perturbation function. The
defined for the blade: the rotor size and the TSR. As mentioned sum of all the mode shapes will be added to the reference airfoil.
earlier the design TSR is 8 and the blade length is 130 m. The local One can add more shape modes to put more focus at any chord-
speed ratios, the local blade radius and the number of blades are the wise location. For example, adding more values below g < 0.1
fundamental inputs to start the integrated design. leads to more detailed changes at leading edge. The amplitude
coefficients fu and fl are updated iteratively until the final airfoil
3.1. Design conditions shape is found.

The design Reynolds number is estimated to be around 3.3. Design objective

Re ¼ 16  106 depending on the radial location and airfoil chord.
The Mach number at blade tip is set to MN ¼ 0.25. The Mach The design objective is the blending of power coefficient and
number changes according to the local speed ratio as well. The rotor solidity, such that
Mach number is considered as a parameter that takes into account
the compressibility effect. Design angle of attack is between 3 and Obj ¼ kCp þ ð1  kÞs1 : (17)
10 . Numerical computations go through angles of attack between
3 and 10 . The wide range of angle of attack is used to take into
account the off-design condition. Free transition simulation is
based on the en model with n ¼ 9; forced transition simulation is
carried out by fixing the upper and lower transition points at 5%
and 10% chord respectively measured from the leading edge. The
numerical tool used for airfoil design is the XFOIL code developed
by Drela [13]. The XFOIL code is iteratively used inside the opti-
mization loop. All the above mentioned flow conditions are written
in an input script that is recognized by the XFOIL code. The output
includes a table of lift and drag coefficients at various angles of
attack and different surface roughness conditions.

3.2. Design variables

The choice of design variables is directly related to the airfoil

shape parameterization. Although lots of functions can be used to
describe airfoil shapes, however, it is imperative to choose proper
functions to represent the airfoil geometry. In the present study,
instead of creating a new airfoil shape, a shape perturbation func-
tion is applied to modify an existing airfoil. The idea of using such
function is to save computational time and inherit the shape from Fig. 2. Example of the shape function.

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thickness location xmax/c ensures good shape compatibility of the

blade; 5. Trailing edge thickness: in practice, a certain thickness
near the trailing edge is required for structural consideration and to
reserve space for equipment; 6. Surface curvature: a constraint on
airfoil surface curvature provides smooth blade surface that en-
hances the structural properties. The tolerance for these constraints
is in the order between 104 and 103 depending on the type of
constraints. For example, the tolerance for airfoil thickness is 104
since lower tolerance will be too excessive and higher tolerance will
give too large deviation about the desired thickness. Most of the
other constraints have the tolerance of about 103 which is based
on the consideration of computational efficiency.

4. Airfoil optimization results

Since the new airfoils are optimized using the previously

Fig. 3. Airfoil shapes of the DTU-R130 family.
The k value is selected such that the power coefficient and the
solidity can be weighted.
To obtain a good off-design property, the power coefficient is
weighted between clean and rough conditions with the angle of
attack ranging from a ¼ 3 to a ¼ 10 as follows,
X
10 X
10
rough
Cp ¼ 0:25 Cpclean þ 0:75 Cp
a¼3 a¼3
If the converged solution is found by the optimizer, Eq. (18)
indicates that the resulted power coefficient is not sensitive to
surface roughness and will keep high value over a wide range of
AOAs.
3.4. Design constraints
The design constraints are: 1. Thickness to chord ratio: for each
airfoil, a thickness to chord ratio is given such as 0.18, 0.21, 0.24 etc.;
2. Maximum lift: to prevent damage at extreme wind condition, a
constraint is given to limit the maximum lift; 3. Surface roughness:
to ensure less surface roughness sensitivity, it is required to limit
the difference in maximum lift for clean and rough cases; 4.
Maximum thickness location: the constraint on maximum
designed DTU-LN-xx airfoil family [9], for the purpose of this paper,
the resulting airfoil will be referred to as DTU-R130-xx airfoils. The
designed airfoil family has five airfoils of thickness to chord ratio
ranging from 18% to 30%. The optimized airfoil geometries are
plotted in Fig. 3. To ensure less three dimensional effects due to
curvature changes along the blade span, the airfoils are designed to
have a smooth geometrical transition between each other. The
shape compatibility is well controlled by the design constraints as
shown in the plots.
Some key design values are given in Table 1. The outer part
(110e130 m) of the blade is constructed with R130-18. The middle
part (40e110 m) contains R130-21, R130-24, R130-27 and R130-30.
(18)
Airfoil geometries between these 5 airfoils are obtained by using
linear interpolation from the two neighboring airfoils. The inner
part (0e40 m) is interpolated between a cylinder and R130-30. The
corresponding local speed ratios are given in the table which are
input to the optimization model. For the sake of manufacturing, the
resulting airfoils have increased trailing edge bluntness along the
blade. Considering the blade shape compatibility, the maximum
thickness location, referred to as xmax/c, also increases while the
thickness increases, as also seen in Table 1. The design lift and
maximum lift for both clean and rough cases are calculated for all
the airfoils. According to the design constraints, the difference in Cl
between clean and rough cases has to be small. As an example of
the R130-18 airfoil, the design lift coefficients CLde are 1.24 and 1.21
for the clean and rough airfoils, respectively. In general, all the
designed airfoils have good characteristics regarding roughness
sensitivity.

Table 1
Airfoil characteristics and blade parameters.

Thickness 18 18 18 21 24 27 30 50 100

Step1: pre-define blade length and TSR

r (m) 130 125 110 80 65 50 40 30 0
x 8 7.69 6.77 4.92 4 3.08 2.46 1.54 e
Step2: airfoil design based on the local TSR
Blunt (%) e e 0.2 0.23 0.3 0.5 0.6 e e
xmax/c e 0.278 0.278 0.308 0.314 0.314 0.327 e 100
CLde e e 1.24/ 1.25/ 1.4/ 1.39/ 1.41/ e e
1.21 1.21 1.34 1.29 1.24
CLmax e e 2.04/ 1.97/ 1.97/1.95 1.89/ 1.89/ e e
2.03 1.96 1.86 1.85
(cl/cd)max e e 146/ 160/ 150/ 151/ 132/ e e
137 130 119 108 84
Step3: Blade construction using the optimal airfoils
Chord (m) 0 2.4 3.57 4.91 5.37 6.99 8.67 10 7
b ( ) e 0.62 0.68 1.65 2.34 4.96 7.7 11 e
f ( ) e 5.62 5.68 7.65 9.34 11.96 14.7 18 e
Solidity e 0.009 0.015 0.029 0.039 0.0668 0.10 e e
Re (106) e 12.4 16.3 16.4 14.8 15.1 15.4 10 5

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Fig. 4. Lift to drag ratio as a function of lift coefficient. (a) R130-18; (b) R130-21; (c) R130-24; (d) R130-27; (e) R130-30.

Fig. 4 shows the lift and drag characteristics of the R130-airfoils.
A curve that weights between clean and rough flow conditions is
shown in each sub-figure (solid line with triangles). The weighting
coefficient is the same as used in Eq. (18). It is seen that the dif-
ference between the maximum lifts of clean and rough cases are
small. The R130-18 and R130-21 airfoils have a similar maximum
lift and the other airfoils have a smaller maximum lift due to
increased thickness. The maximum lift has been limited at a certain
level to keep thrust under a certain level. By looking at the figures, it
is observed that the lift to drag ratio is kept at a high level over a
wide range of lift which implies good off-design property. It is
interesting to check the local power coefficients since it directly
measures the quality of the optimization. The Cp values at different
angles of attack are shown in Fig. 5. From the XFOIL simulations it is
found that the Cp values are relatively high for all the airfoils. More
importantly the Cp curves are quite flat in particular between 5 and
9 . These aerodynamic properties are direct result from the design
objective.
5. Rotor platform and aerodynamic analyses
The output from the integrated design process is different
members of the airfoil family and the baseline rotor. It is necessary
to carry out more comprehensive aerodynamic calculations for the

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Fig. 5. Cp at different AOA. (a) R130-18; (b) R130-21; (c) R130-24; (d) R130-27; (e) R130-30.

Fig. 6. Chord distribution of the pre-designed blade.

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Fig. 7. Twist distribution of the pre-designed blade.

designed blade. In this section, the aerodynamic performance is The axial and tangential induction factors a and a0 are iteratively
analyzed at the design wind speed of U ¼ 10 m/s and TSR ¼ 8. Full calculated including the tip loss effect [15]
blade 3D-BEM and CFD methods are used for purpose of cross
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
validation. 2 þ Y1  4Y1 ð1  FÞ þ Y12
a ¼ (21)
2ð1 þ FY1 Þ
5.1. The basic rotor platform

1
According to Eq. (17), a local high Cp value can be obtained at a a0 ¼ (22)
given blade radial position and the local solidity is minimized. ð1  aFÞY2 =ð1  aÞ  1
When such objective is achieved after some iterations of airfoil
optimization, the optimum values of chord length and flow angle where
are obtained. The chord and twist distributions form the basic
platform of the optimum rotor, which are shown in Figs. 6 and 7. All Y1 ¼ 4F sin2 f=ðsCn F1 Þ; (23)
these results are obtained from XFOIL and 2D-BEM computations
and with the assumption of an idealized normal velocity induction Y2 ¼ 4F sin f cos f=ðsCt F1 Þ (24)
factor of 1/3.
The factor F1 introduced in Eqs. (23) and (24) is to model the tip
effect about airfoil data where
5.2. Full blade BEM approach
  
2 B Rr
The designed blade can thus be analyzed using the full blade F1 ¼ arccos exp  g , (25)
BEM. A standard momentum theory is applied on each blade p 2 r sin f
element such that the thrust and torque are calculated as following
with
[14]

_ 0  V1 Þ ¼ 2pr rVðV0  V1 Þdr ¼ 4pr rV02 að1  aÞdr

dT ¼ dmðV
_ q ¼ 2pr 2 rV,Vq dr ¼ 4pr 3 rV0 ð1  aÞ,ua0 dr
dM ¼ mrV
where the velocity difference between inflow V0 and wake V1
measures the thrust force, Vq measures the azimuthal force
component and rVq is the shaft torque.
(19) g ¼ exp½  0:125ðBl  21Þ þ 0:1: (26)
It is worth noting that the Prandtl tip loss model was applied in
(20) the previous 2D-BEM model. For the 2D airfoil computations, the
optimal Cp of an airfoil is computed with the assumption that a ¼ 1/
3. With this assumption, the advanced tip loss correction [15]
cannot be applied. The advanced tip loss correction is introduced
here with the purpose of better comparison with CFD rotor
simulations.

Fig. 8. Mesh layout of the blade surface and the farfield boundary. Fig. 9. Induction factors calculated from BEM.

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 W.J. Zhu et al. / Renewable Energy xxx (2014) 1e12
Fig. 10. Angles of attack computed from BEM.
5.3. CFD approach
The numerical validation code used in the present study is the
incompressible flow solver EllipSys3D [16,17]. It is a general-
purpose NaviereStokes code based on a second-order multi-block
finite volume method. For wind turbine applications, the Naviere
Stokes equations are solved in a 3D polar rotating frame [18]. In
order to treat the rotating parts, the momentum equations are
written in a frame that rotates around the z-axis with an angular
velocity U. The velocities relative to a fixed frame read
0 1 0 1 0 1
b
vr 0 vr
v q A ¼ @ Ur A þ @ vq A
@b
b
vz 0 vz
where the relative velocity components (vr, vq, vz) are solved in the
polar system. To model turbulent flow, the keu SST model of
Menter is applied [19].
The computational mesh is shown in Fig. 8. The blade is placed
in the middle of the domain. The blade surface mesh is generated
orthogonally with 53,248 mesh points. The volume mesh is created
between the blade wall surface and the outer boundaries. The outer
part of the domain includes an inflow boundary, an outflow
boundary and a cyclic boundary. The mesh is created for one blade
and flow is assumed to be periodic through the two cyclic surfaces.
The total number of grid points is about 10.5 million which is
divided into 40 blocks with 643 grid point per block. To resolve flow
Fig. 11. The calculated yþ values at the blade surface.
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9
Fig. 12. Surface pressure and streamlines on the blade suction side.
around the wall boundary, the smallest cell size near the wall
surface is in the order of 106.
5.4. Computational results
In this subsection, results from full BEM and CFD are collected to
carry out some more detailed analysis. All computations are per-
formed at the design wind speed of U ¼ 10 m/s and TSR ¼ 8. The
chord and twist distributions are seen from Table 1. From r ¼ 40 m
until the blade root, data are interpolated between sections with
relative thickness of 30% and 100%. For the BEM computation, the
blade is divided into 40 elements. To simplify the problem and
make clearer comparisons, the elastic model is not applied in the
(27) BEM code. Also the effects from wind shear and tower shadow are
not included. The yawing, tilting and coning angles are set at zero.
The airfoil data are created by XFOIL with the free transition en
envelope model with the n-factor of 9. These data are already ob-
tained in the ‘Call XFOIL’ procedure as shown in Fig. 1. The power
coefficient obtained from BEM is 0.51 with a pitch angle of 1.75 .
This corresponds to a shaft power of more than 16 MW at a wind
speed of 10 m/s which is below the rated wind speed. The induction
factors are plotted in Fig. 9. The normal and tangential induction
factors are almost constant along the most part of the blade. From
r ¼ 40 m to r ¼ 110 m, the normal induction factor is a bit above 0.35
which is slightly higher than the design value of 1/3. It is known
that a ¼ 1/3 corresponds to Cp ¼ 0.59 which is a theoretical value.
By forcing a ¼ 1/3, the designed airfoils have Cp value as high as
0.54e0.55. Further full blade BEM computation yields an overall Cp
10 W.J. Zhu et al. / Renewable Energy xxx (2014) 1e12
Fig. 13. Blade normal and tangential forces from BEM and CFD calculations.
of 0.51 which is affected by tip and root losses. It is observed that
the axial induction factor decreases very sharply towards tip.
Therefore, to correctly model the physical flow around the tip, it is
necessary to involve a tip loss function in the airfoil design. In the
present case, the R130-18 airfoil is used along the blade span be-
tween r ¼ 110 m and r ¼ 130 m which is influenced by the tip
correction. The Cp values are slightly smaller for the R130-18 airfoil
than the other airfoils, see Fig. 5. From r ¼ 40 m towards tip, the
angles of attack are well below 10 as shown in Fig. 10. This in-
dicates attached flow over most part of the blade which ensures the
high power performance.
Full rotor experiments are often impractical for large wind tur-
bines, especially in the design stage; instead, CFD is used to perform
Fig. 14. Contour plot of surface pressure coefficient and pressure contour at 5 blade sections.
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more detailed aerodynamic analyze. Since the Reynolds number is
very high in the present case, it is necessary to check the mesh
resolution near the wall. The required mesh size always depends on
the purpose of simulation and on the Reynolds number. The selec-
tion of the smallest grid size is often defined in priori based on the
user’s experience. A straight-forward way to check the wall reso-
lution is to calculate the dimensionless wall distance value yþ. After
post-processing of the flow field, a plot of the yþ value is shown in
Fig.11. It appears in the present case that the yþ values everywhere is
less than 1.2 which is located at the leading edge of the blade outer
part. This ensures that the viscous sub-layer is well resolved.
The flow attachment can also be observed from CFD simulation
via the velocity streamlines on the blade surface. The streamlines
on the suction side of the blade are demonstrated in Fig. 12 together
with wall pressure contours. It is seen that the flow is well attached
along the design region where flow separation occurs at blade root
where r < 40 m. It is known that three dimensional effects become
stronger in the inner part which leads to strong separation. Such a
flow condition near blade root leads to many difficulties for thick
airfoil design using simplified tools such as XFOIL and BEM. The
study of thicker airfoil design for blade inboard part will be focused
in the future work.
Load calculations are the most important tasks of blade aero-
dynamic simulations. The axial and the tangential force distribu-
tions are depicted in Fig. 13. Good agreements are observed
between full blade BEM and CFD methods. For both axial and
tangential forces, CFD predicts slightly higher forces than BEM
which is observed from 40 < r < 130 m. Such a difference is often
caused by the rotational effect that has been modeled by CFD but
not enough counted by BEM. The laminar boundary layer tends to
become thinner while rotation is taking into effect, this leads to a
higher force in reality. The numerical accuracy of velocity induction
in the full BEM simulation might also influence the force distribu-
tion. Although CFD is much more reliable in most cases, it has not
reached the stage that can be used as a design tool. To better design
 W.J. Zhu et al. / Renewable Energy xxx (2014) 1e12 11

Fig. 15. Surface pressure coefficients computed from CFD and BEM. (a) Y ¼ 110 m; (b) Y ¼ 80 m; (c) Y ¼ 65 m; (d) Y ¼ 50 m; (e) Y ¼ 40 m.

or predict forces at blade inboard, it is necessary to use some more
sophisticated method to remedy the existing engineering tools.
Besides analyzing the force distribution along the blade, a more
detailed study can be performed by considering local blade sec-
tions. The pressure coefficient along the blade is displayed in Fig. 14,
where a smooth load distribution along the surface can be
observed. Also illustrated in Fig. 14 are cross-sectional pressure
contours at various spanwise locations. The size of the airfoil chord
continuously increases towards root which corresponds to each
spanwise locations, e.g., from Y ¼ 110 m to Y ¼ 40 m. According to
Table 1, the airfoils presented at these locations are the R130-18,
R130-21, R130-24, R130-27 and R130-30 airfoils, from tip towards
root, respectively. Since these airfoils are designed by integrating
XFOIL and 2D-BEM, it is an interesting validation to compare
pressure forces along each section using XFOIL and CFD. The
pressure coefficient can be obtained after post-processing from the
CFD calculation, e.g., to be extracted from Fig. 14. The full 3D-BEM
calculation already provides angles of attack along the blade, as
shown in Fig. 10. Therefore, angles of attack are found for each blade
spanwise location. Using these angles of attack to perform XFOIL
simulation with a free transition model, the pressure coefficients
are obtained. With the same free transition model and the same n-
factor, the comparisons of XFOIL and CFD are shown in Fig. 15, each
sub-figure corresponds to one spanwise location. These results
reflect several facts: (1) The full BEM model performs quite well
that provides accurate angles of attack; (2) XFOIL is in well agree-
ment with CFD prediction for the blade outpart; (3) Over prediction
of XFOIL becomes evident at blade inboard as seen in Fig. 15(e).

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12 W.J. Zhu et al. / Renewable Energy xxx (2014) 1e12
6. Conclusions
An integrated method to design airfoils and rotor blade is
introduced. The design procedure mainly includes three steps. In the
first step, the tip speed ratio and rotor size are determined. These
two parameters determine the output airfoils and the blade plat-
form. Step two is the airfoil optimization based on the blade local
speed ratio. Local 2D airfoil BEM computations are performed dur-
ing the airfoil optimization which provides values of local power
coefficient and rotor solidity for the airfoil optimizer. In step three,
results from BEM are collected at the final iteration of the airfoil
optimization loop. The results at the final iteration indicate that the
condition of the optimal flow angle and chord length exists. Most of
the computational effort has been put in step two to determine
optimal airfoils. The common characteristics of the resulted airfoils
are high Cp values over a wide range of angles of attack. The airfoils
are also very insensitive to roughness condition. As a result of the
BEM computation, the optimal platform for the blade is obtained
which can be regarded as the baseline shape for the second phase
design. Validations carried out by full blade BEM and CFD both
showed good aerodynamic characteristics. All these agreements
indicate that the integration of the simplified BEM and XFOIL can be
regarded as a reliable tool for airfoil and rotor platform design.
Acknowledgment
The research work is partially supported by two projects. The
authors wish to express acknowledgment to the Danish Energy
Agency (EUDP project j.nr. 64011-0094) and the Ministry of Science
(DSF project Sagsnr. 12-130590).
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