Aeroelastic analysis of wind turbines under turbulent inflow conditions

Abstract

The aeroelastic response of a 2 MW NM80 turbine with a rotor diameter of 80 m and interaction phenomena are investigated by the use of a high-fidelity model. A time-accurate unsteady fluid–structure interaction (FSI) coupling is used between a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for the aerodynamic response and a multi-body simulation (MBS) code for the structural response. Different CFD models of the same turbine with increasing complexity and technical details are coupled to the same MBS model in order to identify the impact of the different modeling approaches. The influence of the blade and tower flexibility and of the inflow turbulence is analyzed starting from a specific case of the DANAERO experiment, where a comparison with experimental data is given. A wider range of uniform inflow velocities are investigated by the use of a blade element momentum (BEM) aerodynamic model. Lastly a fatigue analysis is performed from load signals in order to identify the most damaging load cycles and the fatigue ratio between the different models, showing that a highly turbulent inflow has a larger impact than flexibility, when low inflow velocities are considered. The results without the injection of turbulence are also discussed and compared to the ones provided by the BEM code AeroDyn.