Buckling Analysis of Wind Turbine Blade Using Pressure Distributions Obtained from CFD

Abstract

Buckling analysis of a rotating wind turbine blade using FEM(finite element method) is presented here. This study is distinct from its counterparts in adopting the pressure distributions obtained from CFD(computational fluid dynamics) calculations to perform the buckling analysis. A code is developed to feed those pressure distributions into the FE(finite element) model of the blade. Through the analysis, load factors and buckling shapes of the first four buckling modes of the blade under six different wind speeds are computed. Buckling analysis of the blade with the reduced pressure distributions adopted in an open literature has also been performed in this paper and the results are compared with present analysis. It is concluded that CFD techniques can effectively predict the load characteristics of wind turbines and it is reasonable to employ pressure distributions obtained from CFD calculations as load conditions to perform buckling analysis or other structural analysis of wind turbine blades, while the reduced pressure distributions can not reflect the inherent stall phenomena because of its artificial assumptions and it should be abandoned in the design of future wind turbines.