The Effect of Blade Thickness on the Noise Sources of VerticalAxis Wind Turbines

The biggest challenge of wind turbines is noisepollution, especially for vertical axis types used in residentialareas. In this present work, the noise sources of an H-type verticalaxis wind turbine are simulated and the effect of blade thicknesson the noise sources is investigated. For this purpose, twodimensionalsimulation is performed using URANS equationscoupled with the SST-KW turbulence model, and then the noisesources for different blade thicknesses are compared with eachother. The results show that effective noise sources are locatedaround only one of the blades. The Studies also show that reducingthe thickness of blades amplifies noise sources generated by theblades.

Keywords:

Numerical simulation , RANS , Vertical axis windturbine , Wind energy