Integrated airfoil and blade design method for large wind turbines

This paper presents an integrated method for designing airfoil families of large wind turbine blades. For a given rotor diameter and tip speed ratio, the optimal airfoils are designed based on the local speed ratios. To achieve high power performance at low cost, the airfoils are designed with an objective of high Cp 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 the previous in-house airfoil family which were optimized at a Reynolds number of 3 million. A novel shape perturbation function is introduced to optimize the geometry on the existing airfoils and thus simplify the design procedure. The viscos/inviscid code Xfoil is used as the aerodynamic tool for airfoil optimization where the Reynolds number is set at 16 million with a free-stream Mach number of 0.25 at the blade tip. Results show that these new airfoils achieve high power coefficient in a wide range of angles of attack (AOA) and they are extremely insensitive to surface roughness.