The efficiency of a wind turbine is directly affected by the direction and the speed of the wind blowing towards the turbine blades. Considering the fact that wind blows from many directions with variable speeds, it would be seen that there is a requirement for designing new, optimized and highly efficient airfoils for wind turbines. This work is a preliminary work of an airfoil design project for wind turbines. Numerical analysis has been performed at high Reynolds number and low angles of attack (0 degrees <=alpha <= 20 degrees) for six different airfoils. Among the investigated airfoils, CLARK Y has been found to show the best performance considering the variation of C-L-alpha and C-L/C-D-alpha. In this study, where only steady computations have been performed, it has been seen that the validity of steady computations were limited up to different angles of attack for each airfoil. For the cases of higher angles, it was understood that the convergence of steady analyses was not achievable.

WOS: 000302108000006