Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine Performance Prediction Code for Personal Computers (User's Guide)

Under contract to the Wind Energy Research Center (WERC), four contractors exercised their performance prediction methods to predict the performance of two horizontal axis machines (Reference 1). Based on the results of that study, one of the methods (AeroVironment blade-element/momentum PROP code) was adopted for routine performance calculations at the WERC. Desirable features of theAerovironment PROP code are that it is an efficiently written short code which can sweep tip speed ratio and blade pitch in one computer run. The code includes the Glauert approximation for low wind speed analysis and can accommodate a different airfoil data table for each blade element. In its original form this code had a few limitations. All calculations were done in a nondimensional formatwith performance expressed in terms of power coefficient versus tip speed ratio. The program was originally written with the blade segment n umber fixed at ten and no provisions were included to account for yawed flow effects.