Exploration of a Computational Fluid Dynamics Integrated Design Methodology for Potential Application to a Wind Turbine Blade

The main purpose of this thesis is to conduct a parametric sensitivity study on the blade design of AOC 15/50 wind turbine based on a CFD approach and optimize the blade design for maximizing the power output. The ANSYS Fluent flow solver using the K-w SST Turbulence model was validated by simulating the flow over two dimensional airfoils comprising the AOC 15/50 turbine blade. The CFD results have shown a considerable agreement with the experimental data for the airfoils.