New Theory for Wind Turbines

                                                 Transport of 50 meter wind turbine blade.


Wind turbines commonly use stall control to limit the power at higher wind speeds, as described in the 2001 thesis Flow Separation on Wind Turbine Blades by Gustave Paul Corten. The thesis starts with the following description of state-of-the-art:

• Presently it is impossible to calculate the lift and drag characteristics of an airfoil accurately. Especially beyond the stall angle, the calculations can be off by tens of percents. For that reason airfoil characteristics still have to be determined in wind tunnels.

We show on The Secret of Flight based on New Theory of Flight that today it is possible to compute lift and drag characteristics of airfoils in the full range of angles of attack including stall and beyond to a tolerance of 5%, by solving the Navier-Stokes equations with slip boundary condition. This opens new possibilities in wind turbine design and control.