Renewable Energy: Beginner CFD Training Package — Ep 10
HAWT: Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine
- Lesson
- 10
- Run Time
- 11m 13s
- Published
- Aug 8, 2026
- Category
- Renewable Energy
- Course Progress
- 0%
Description
This project investigates the airflow over a Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) using ANSYS Fluent, with the aim of studying the velocity and pressure distribution across the blade surfaces and body. As the dominant technology in modern wind power, the HAWT is a cornerstone of renewable energy engineering, where analyzing blade aerodynamics is essential to maximizing the energy captured from the wind.
The 3D model was created in SOLIDWORKS and imported into Design Modeler. The turbine consists of three blades, a rotary axis, and a surrounding flow domain. Meshing was performed in ANSYS Meshing using a structured grid of 4,270,222 elements.
Methodology
The simulation aims to examine the effect of the wind on the turbine blades and to calculate the drag and lift forces acting on the blade surfaces. The blades rotate about the horizontal axis at a rotational speed of 72 rad/s, while the air surrounding them is treated as stationary.
Using the Multiple Reference Frame (MRF) method, the blades are held fixed and the air region around them is assigned a rotating frame turning at the same 72 rad/s about the y-axis. Because this is an external-flow problem, the k-omega SST model is used; this hybrid formulation blends the k-omega model in the near-wall regions with the k-epsilon model in the free stream beyond the boundary layer. Air enters the domain at a velocity of 15 m/s and exits through a pressure-outlet boundary at atmospheric pressure.
Conclusion
On completion of the solution, contours of velocity, streamlines, and velocity vectors were obtained. The velocity contour clearly reveals the radial distribution of the airflow produced by the rotating blades, while the velocity vectors near the blade surfaces show, in detail, the interaction between the wind and the turbine blade. Together, these results illustrate how the blade extracts energy from the incoming wind — the fundamental aerodynamic behavior that governs the performance of a wind turbine in renewable energy applications.