A Comparative Study of CFD Models of a Real Wind Turbine in Solar Chimney Power Plants

A solar chimney power plant consists of four main parts, a solar collector, a chimney, an energy storage layer, and a wind turbine. So far, several investigations on the performance of the solar chimney power plant have been conducted. Among them, different approaches have been applied to model the turbine inside the system. In particular, a real wind turbine coupled to the system was simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in three investigations. Gholamalizadeh et al. simulated a wind turbine with the same blade profile as the Manzanares SCPP’s turbine (FX W-151-A blade profile), while a CLARK Y blade profile was modelled by Guo et al. and Ming et al. In this study, simulations of the Manzanares prototype were carried out using the CFD model developed by Gholamalizadeh et al. Then, results obtained by modelling different turbine blade profiles at different turbine rotational speeds were compared. The results showed that a turbine with the CLARK Y blade profile significantly overestimates the value of the pressure drop across the Manzanares prototype turbine as compared to the FX W-151-A blade profile. In addition, modelling of both blade profiles led to very similar trends in changes in turbine efficiency and power output with respect to rotational speed.