The aim of this study is to analyze the effects of varying the amount of taper with pointed tip of a turbine blade using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). A 3D CFD model for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) phase VI turbine blade was made using S809 airfoil profile in GAMBIT. The steady-state numerical solution is carried out by solving three-dimensional conservation equations for mass and momentum using the structured grid finite volume methodology. A structured grid of approximately 2 million cells formulates the computational domain. A k-w SST turbulent model is considered and Commercial CFD code ANSYS FLUENT is used to find the pressure coefficient  as well as the lift  and drag coefficient  The comparisons for three different blade tips (3° pitch angle) are shown for the surface pressure distributions at several stations along the blades as well as for the field domain. The comparisons show that the used CFD code can accurately predict the spanwise loading of the wind turbine blade. The computational results are compared and found to be a good agreement with existing pointed tip solution at zero taper. Effects of variation of taper on aerodynamic loads are also presented.

wind turbine, CFD, blade taper, blade tip.