Recent researches in the field of the design of large wind turbine blades showed that using blunt, or flatback airfoils at the inboard section has several structural and aerodynamical benefits. In the present paper the design of two optimized flatback airfoils with the same maximum thickness but with different trailing edge gap presented, and then the effects of some design parameters in design and optimization of the flatback airfoils are investigated. Since the design of the airfoil sections is a multidisciplinary field, involving several aerodynamic and structural parameters, the Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm, which is classified as a stochastic algorithm, was used to design the optimized shape of the flatback airfoil sections. CFD calculations in the optimization process were performed using the commercial FLUENT code. The design Reynolds number was 6 x10~6 and the optimized airfoil sections have 35% relative thickness with a trailing edge gap of 10% and 12.5% respectively. The optimization results show that the optimized flatback airfoils have several benefits compared to currently applied flatback airfoils. The results for these new optimized flatback airfoils are mainly a higher lift coefficient and sectional moment of inertia compared to the current flatback airfoils.
展开▼
