Aero-Structural Blade Design of a High-Power Wind Turbine

Abstract

The present work focused on the development of an aero-structural design framework for a high-power horizontal axis wind turbine. To achieve this, it was necessary to carefully characterize the blade, to develop a suitable fluid-structure interaction solver and, finally, to combine both with post-processing tools. A fluid-structure interaction solver was developed for OpenFOAM, dedicated to simulate wind turbine rotors. The fluid-structure coupling was achieved through a loose coupling strategy, which means that there are separated solvers for the flow and structure analysis, which are combined through the update of boundary conditions. To simulate the blades rotation movement, an approach based on the single rotating frame method was used, meaning that the whole domain rotated with the turbine rotor with a constant angular velocity. The simulations of the rotor produced valid and interesting results namely, correct flow fields and pressure distributions. Considering that it is expected horizontal axis wind turbine rotors to continue growing to even larger sizes than the one modeled, it was shown that blade displacements due to flow induced forces are definitely a problem that needs to be taken into account when designing new wind turbine blades.

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