Aeromechanical Analysis of a Complete Wind Turbine Using Nonlinear Frequency Domain Solution Method

Abstract

The high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of a complete wind turbine model usually require significant computational resources. It will require much more resources if the fluid-structure interactions between the blade and the flow are considered, and it has been the major challenge in the industry. The aeromechanical analysis of a complete wind turbine model using a high-fidelity CFD method is discussed in this paper. The distinctiveness of this paper is the application of the nonlinear frequency domain solution method to analyse the forced response and flutter instability of the blade as well as to investigate the unsteady flow field across the wind turbine rotor and the tower. This method also enables the aeromechanical simulations of wind turbines for various inter blade phase angles in a combination with a phase shift solution method. Extensive validations of the nonlinear frequency domain solution method against the conventional time domain solution method reveal that the proposed frequency domain solution method can reduce the computational cost by one to two orders of magnitude.

High-resolution direct numerical simulations of flow structure and aerodynamic performance of wind turbine airfoil at wide range of Reynolds numbers

“…They found that the inlet wakes have substantial effect on wind turbine aerodynamics and separation point. In another numerical study, Naung et al [2,3] utilized the frequency-domain method to predict the forced response and flutter instability over the wind turbine blades. They concluded that by using the newly designed model, the computation time can be reduced by order of 2 compared to the other models.…”