[jkkibrahim]

Hi,

I am new to wind turbine modeling. I appreciate if someone can give me an idea if the CFD tools such as star-CD or CFX are practical for the design and optimization of the wind turbine (especially the blades) or people usually use other practical packages commercial packages where you put your inputs and you receive the details about the wind turbine parameters needed for these specification?
I also appreciate if you can advice me about which package is more capable in the design CFX or star-CD that account for FSI with less memorey requirements.
Thank you,

John

[jbritton]

both star cd and cfx are both capable of blade optimisation, another to consider is fluent.

For 2-D blade analysis I would use Fluent. For 3-D I would use CFX just for ease of use, you could also look at using design explorer to automatically optimise a blade profile so long as you don't use too many parameters.

Star-CD I dont have too much experience with, so not too sure about how it is with blade optimisation and analysis. I do know from chatting with a colleague that star cd can do some fsi, but apparently its not quite as in depth as what you can get using a 2 way fsi in cfx, tho he may well be wrong on this. In fact if any one could explain the star cd fsi capabilities that would be quite interesting.

But most of the paper I see on blades and airfoils have the analysis done in Fluent.

For full turbine analysis fluent and cfx will def be able to help out, star cd again I've not got experience with rotating bodies star cd but interested to hear a star cd users opinions