On the effect of blade deformations on the aerodynamic performance of wind turbine rotors subjected to yawed inflow
conference paper
This work is aimed to investigate the effects of elastic blade deformations on the
aerodynamics of large wind turbine rotors subjected to yawed inflow. Due to the increasing
rotor size and advanced light weight blade designs, significant blade deflections can be observed on a regular basis for modern wind turbines. However, especially for complex flow situations like yawed inflow, the role of blade deformations is still not completely understood. In this paper, numerical simulations are conducted on the DTU 10 MW reference wind turbine to gain a better understanding of the involved phenomena. Results are obtained by two numerical methods of different fidelity. First, by the aero-elastic simulation tool FAST, which is based on the low fidelity Blade Element Momentum Theory (BEM) and makes use of common skewed wake correction models. Secondly, by a high-fidelity framework which couples the open-source
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) toolbox OpenFOAM with the in-house geometrically
non-linear beam solver BeamFOAM. The evaluation of the results is based on the analysis of
azimuthal variations of the sectional forces along the blade span and reveals a generally good
agreement between the used numerical approach in terms of force amplitudes and variation
phases. However, especially for cases of larger yaw angles, the BEM models clearly over-predict
the variation amplitudes of the forces up to 40% in the outer blade part.
aerodynamics of large wind turbine rotors subjected to yawed inflow. Due to the increasing
rotor size and advanced light weight blade designs, significant blade deflections can be observed on a regular basis for modern wind turbines. However, especially for complex flow situations like yawed inflow, the role of blade deformations is still not completely understood. In this paper, numerical simulations are conducted on the DTU 10 MW reference wind turbine to gain a better understanding of the involved phenomena. Results are obtained by two numerical methods of different fidelity. First, by the aero-elastic simulation tool FAST, which is based on the low fidelity Blade Element Momentum Theory (BEM) and makes use of common skewed wake correction models. Secondly, by a high-fidelity framework which couples the open-source
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) toolbox OpenFOAM with the in-house geometrically
non-linear beam solver BeamFOAM. The evaluation of the results is based on the analysis of
azimuthal variations of the sectional forces along the blade span and reveals a generally good
agreement between the used numerical approach in terms of force amplitudes and variation
phases. However, especially for cases of larger yaw angles, the BEM models clearly over-predict
the variation amplitudes of the forces up to 40% in the outer blade part.
Topics
TNO Identifier
874895
ISSN
17426596
Source
The Science of Making Torque from Wind (TORQUE 2018), 1037, pp. 1-12.
Publisher
Institute of Physics Publishing
Pages
1-12