Abstract
The Froude-scaled offshore floating wind turbine model is inevitably affected by the Reynolds number effect, making the model unable to correctly reproduce the thrust performance of the reference wind turbine (RWT). To solve this problem, an Xfoil-AirfoilPrep-Matlab (XAM) system and a wide tip speed ratio search method (WTSM) are proposed to design a wide tip speed ratio (TSR) thrust-match model blade. The XAM system is utilized to select the best airfoil for WTSM by calculating the lift and drag coefficients of several airfoils. The WTSM is utilized to optimize the blade chord and twist. It formalizes the blade chord and twist by polynomials and then optimizes the polynomial coefficients. The thrust coefficients construct the optimization object at different TSRs. For validating the effect of the redesigned blade, the thrust performance is compared to that of the RWT blade. In addition, the thrust performance of redesigned blade at different pitch angles is also calculated and compared to those of the RWT blade. Results show that the thrust performance of redesigned blade matches well with that of the RWT blade at 0 pitch angle, and it can also match the variations of that of the RWT blade at the other pitch angles well.
Highlights
With the development of the offshore floating wind turbine (OFWT) technique, the capacity and geometry of OFWTs are rapidly increasing [1,2,3,4,5]
This paper proposes a XAM system to select the best airfoil for redesigning the blade first
A wide tip speed ratio search method (WTSM) based on grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA) is put forward to optimize the blade chord and twist of the redesigned blade
Summary
With the development of the offshore floating wind turbine (OFWT) technique, the capacity and geometry of OFWTs are rapidly increasing [1,2,3,4,5]. The increases promote the need for the OFWT design cost reduction approach [6] In this scenario, the scaled model method is the most commonly used one [7,8]. Due to the Reynolds number effect (RNE), the Froude-scaled OFWT model cannot correctly reproduce the aerodynamic performance of the reference wind turbine (RWT) [9,10,11,12], especially the thrust performance. To solve this problem, the redesigning blade method is proposed and widely studied [13]. The second step is adjusting the blade geometry, which is mainly described by the blade chord and twist, by manual or optimization algorithm to obtain a redesigned blade matching the RWT blade in thrust performance
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