ABSTRACT
Wind energy is the most rapidly expanding source of energy in the world today. Over the past 10 years, the worldwide installed capacity of wind energy has grown at an average rate of nearly 25" per year, leading to an installed nameplate capacity at the end of 2012 of about 286,000 MW. The aerodynamic analysis of a wind turbine has two primary objectives: to predict the aerodynamic performance or power production of the turbine, and to predict the detailed time-varying distribution of aerodynamic loads acting on the turbine rotor blades. Modern wind turbines use the lift generated by the blades to produce power, and since the blades must be widely separated to generate the maximum amount of lift, wind turbines have a small number of blades. Momentum-based models are extremely popular with wind turbine designers because they are simple, fast, and fairly accurate for performance prediction, especially after they are tuned for a particular configuration.
