Abstract
Large and flexible wind turbine blades may be susceptible to severe blade deformations coupled with dynamic stall. To advance prediction capability for this problem a general deforming mesh computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method has been developed for calculating flows with moving or deforming boundaries using an elastic spring analogy. The method has been evaluated against experimental data for flow around a pitching NACA0012 airfoil in the deep dynamic stall regime where flow is highly separated, and compared with other authors0 CFD simulations for pitching airfoil. The effects of varying the reduced frequency are also investigated. During the upstroke the present results are in generally good agreement with experiment and other CFD studies. During the downstroke some differences with experiment and other CFD models are apparent. This may be due to the sensitivity of the separated flow to modelling assumptions and experimental conditions. Overall, the degree of agreement between CFD and experiment is considered encouraging.