INVERSE DESIGN FOR WIND TURBINE AIRFOIL BASED ON PANEL METHOD

In the preliminary design stage of wind turbines, obtaining accurate data on aerodynamic characteristics can greatly reduce the number of production and testing cycles. Thus, developing a design method with high speed and accuracy has great practical value in engineering. In this paper, the airfoil characteristics are expressed by the cosine separation method, and an aerodynamic analysis model is established, which is based on the constant-strength doublet distribution panel method. By comparing the experimental data with calculated value of Xfoil, it is suggested that the above model is practicable when the angle of attack ranges from -8° to 8°.Then, the improved Hickes-Henne shape function is adopted for parametric modeling and the sequential quadratic programming is used for optimal solution, after which the inverse design model is established, which takes the minimum standard deviation of pressure coefficients as the objective function. According to the calculation results for 40~280 panels, it can be concluded that the simulation analysis is highly efficient when the number of panels is 60~100. Finally, standard airfoil models of different thickness distribution or symmetry are adapted for simulation analysis. It is showed that the results are of high convergence and accuracy. Thereby the inverse design method is validated as reasonable, effective, and robust.