Abstract. Aero-servo-elastic analyses are required to determine the wind turbine loading for a wide range of load cases as specified in certification standards. The floating reference frame (FRF) formulation can be used to model the structural response of long and flexible wind turbine blades. Increasing the number of bodies in the FRF formulation of the blade increases both the fidelity of the structural model and the size of the problem. However, the turbine load analysis is a coupled aero-servo-elastic analysis, and computation cost not only depends on the size of the structural model, but also depends on the aerodynamic solver and the number of iterations between the solvers. This study presents an investigation of the performance of the different fidelity levels as measured by the computational cost and the turbine response (e.g., blade loads, tip clearance, tower-top accelerations). The analysis is based on aeroelastic simulations for normal operation in turbulent inflow load cases as defined in a design standard. Two 10 MW reference turbines are used. The results show that the turbine response quickly approaches the results of the highest-fidelity model as the number of bodies increases. The increase in computational costs to account for more bodies can almost entirely be compensated for by changing the type of the matrix solver from dense to sparse.

This paper presents a comprehensive study of the evaluation of the effect of spar cap fiber orientation angle of composite blades with induced bending–torsion coupling (IBTC) on the aero-structural performance wind turbines. Aero-structural performance of wind turbines with IBTC blades is evaluated with the fatigue load mitigation in the whole wind turbine system, tower clearances, peak stresses in the blades, and power generation of wind turbines. For this purpose, a full E-glass/epoxy reference blade has been designed, following the inverse design methodology for a 5-MW wind turbine. An E-glass/epoxy blade with IBTC and novel, hybrid E-glass/carbon/epoxy blades with IBTC have been designed and aeroelastic time-marching multibody simulations of the 5-MW turbine systems, with the reference blade and the blades with IBTC, have been carried out using six different randomly generated turbulent wind profiles. Fatigue-equivalent loads (FELs) in the wind turbine have been determined as an average of the results obtained from the time response of six different simulations. The results reveal that certain hybrid blade designs with IBTC are more effective in fatigue load mitigation than the E-glass–epoxy blade with IBTC, and besides the fiber orientation angle, sectional properties of hybrid blades must be adjusted accordingly using proper number of carbon/epoxy layers in the sections of the blade with IBTC, in order to simultaneously reduce generator power losses and the FEL.

Non-intrusive nonlinear reduced order modeling (ROM) techniques have been applied by researchers to obtain computationally cheap and yet accurate structural responses of aircraft panels. However, its application to wind turbine blades is new and challenging due to much larger deflections of wind turbine blades. This study improves a non-intrusive nonlinear ROM method for wind turbine blades going through large deflections. In the nonlinear ROM, the nonlinear stiffness is described by the quadratic and cubic functions, and the secondary motions induced by the primary large deflections are described by the modal derivative vectors in the reduction basis. The non-intrusive nature of the method requires a geometrically nonlinear solver, and HAWC2 is chosen in this study for the computation of nonlinear stiffness terms. Two examples, including a cantilever beam example and the NREL 5MW wind turbine blade model, are used to evaluate the accuracy and computational effectiveness of the nonlinear ROMs. The cantilever beam example shows that the nonlinear ROM can accurately capture the axial displacements due to large deflections reaching 20 % of span length as well as the torsion coupled with flapwise and edgewise motions. The NREL blade example shows that the nonlinear ROM is accurate for the tip displacements more than 5.9 m. Because the size of the nonlinear ROM is much smaller than that of HAWC2 model, a speedup factor of 8.5 for computational time is observed for the NREL blade example.

Floating wind farms present the opportunity to harvest wind resources located in deep water sites. Shared mooring designs can contribute in making floating wind energy more cost-competitive, and it is important to understand the new system dynamics that arise. We are presenting here HAWC2Farm, an extension of HAWC2 that can model multiple wind turbines with shared mooring lines. We apply the new modeling capabilities to simulate two 15 MW floating wind turbines on spar floaters with shared mooring lines. We consider two different sites and we identify and compare the natural frequencies and mode shapes of the shared mooring designs with those of an individual moored turbine. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of design parameters on the systems’ natural frequencies and we show that it is possible for a shared mooring design to achieve similar characteristics as a single turbine design. Finally, we test the response of the shared mooring design in steady wind and regular waves and find that the surge displacement of the upstream turbine and its mooring line loads are considerably larger compared to the single turbine case.

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