The purpose of this 3-D numerical simulation is to evaluate the application of a commercial CFD code to predict 3-D flow and power characteristics of wind turbines. The experimental approach, which has been main method of investigation, appears to be its limits, the cost increasing with the size of the wind turbines, hence mostly limited to observing the phenomena on rotor blades. Therefore. the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques and Navier-Stokes solvers are considered a very serious contender. The flow solver CFX-TASCflow is employed in all computations in this paper. The 3-D flow separation and the wake distribution of 2 and 3 bladed Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWTs) are compared to Heuristic model and smoke-visualized experimental result by NREL(National Renewable Energy Laboratory). Simulated 3-D flow separation structure on the rotor blade is very similar to Heuristic model and the wake structure of the wind turbine is good consistent with smoke-visualized result. The calculated power of the 3 bladed rotor by CFD is compared with BEM results by TU-Delft. The CFD results of which is somewhat consist with BEM results. under an error less than 10%.
