Several studies on wind energy have been conducted to find possible solutions to power issues related to the variable nature of the wind. One of the most promising seems to be the application of sinusoidal modifications (tubercles) on the leading edge of wind turbine blades. In the present work, a systematic study on the effects of different tubercle configurations on NREL phase VI wind turbine performance is conducted. A design of experiments is used to generate blades with different tubercle amplitude and wavelength that are then simulated by a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. The resulting power and annual energy production (AEP) are compared with the baseline values noticing a positive effect of tubercles on the power at high wind speeds.

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The coupling of aerodynamics and structural mechanics is an important step in the design process of aeronautical devices with morphing parts. In this paper, a 2D-3D coupling approach is developed to study a morphing blade cascade. Two shape memory alloy actuators are placed on the upper and lower sides of the blade to make possible the change in shape of the leading-edge. In the present work, a preliminary design study is conducted by considering a two-dimensional CFD analysis of an airfoil cascade coupled with a three-dimensional structural analysis of the whole 3D blade. A methodology is developed to match 2D and 3D meshes such that the aerodynamic loads can be easily transferred to the structural analysis. From there, the deformed blade geometry due to both aerodynamic loads and actuator work can be transferred back to the CFD solver, and the iterative aero-structural coupling loop can be repeated until convergence. The aero-structural coupling strategy developed in this work is also applied to a blade cascade study aiming to improve its performance by morphing the leading-edge of the blade. The results of this application show that by morphing the leading-edge blade of only few millimeters (less than 2 mm), it is possible to achieve a relevant performance improvement in terms of total pressure loss coefficient decrease of about 53%.