The effect of the tower’s modeling on the aero-elastic response of the NREL 5 MW wind turbine

Abstract

In this work, we aim at evaluating the aeroelastic response of the blades of a standalone NREL 5MW wind turbine by means of a high-fidelity fluid-structure interaction solver based on large-eddy simulation, and compare the results with those of engineering-fidelity methods based on the Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory. For the latter, we use the software OpenFAST [1], which couples an aerodynamic solver based on the BEM theory with a solver of the blades’ structural dynamics. Concerning the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver, the tower and nacelle are modeled by means of an immersed boundary method, whereas the aeroelastic rotor is modeled by an actuator line model coupled with a Computational Structural Dynamics (CSD) solver representing the blades as rotating cantilever beams. A comparison of the CFD-CSD results with the corresponding ones obtained by OpenFAST shows that the predicted displacements at the blade tip remarkably differ between the two approaches in correspondence of the passages of the blades in front of the tower. Indeed, the interaction between the blades and the tower introduces a significant perturbation in the local aerodynamics that leads to a drop of the displacement at the tip of the blade and of the root reaction magnitude, which appear to be not accurately described by OpenFAST.