Aeroelastic Computation of a Wind Turbine Blade Profile

Abstract

Wind turbine is one of the important devices to extract clean energy from the wind flow. The efficiency of wind turbines must be examined under various working conditions in order to estimate the off-design performance. Numerous aerodynamic and structural research works have been carried out to compute the aeroelastic effects on wind turbines. Most of those suffer from either simplicity of the modeling approach or from the difficulty of the computing technique which limit the practical applicability of the results. In this research, a robust approach is proposed to compute the aeroelastic behavior of a horizontal axis wind turbine for the preliminary design purposes. The simplicity and applicability of the taken approach are the significant points of the research work. Aerodynamic and elastic computations are done using XFOIL and MATLAB PDE toolbox respectively. Those software are linked through an algorithm to compute aeroelastic effects interactively. A real measured time history of wind velocity is used as an input flow condition to simulate a real of angle of attack for the aeroelastic computation. Investigation of numerical output shows lift and drag coefficient values are lower compared to corresponding values of the rigid profile. Also the study of modulus of elasticity value on the separation point location is conducted and the delayed stall is observed by decreasing the airfoil rigidity.