Comparison of State-of-the-art Aeroelastic Simulation Tools for Wind Turbines

Increasing rotor diameter and a flexible lightweight blade structure – this combination is characteristic for recent and future generations of wind turbines. Complex interactions with the support structure of the turbine and the environment result in challenging aeroelastic properties. This raises the question whether current simulation tools are comparable in their ability of predicting the behaviour of modern wind turbine rotor designs.
The talk summarizes a code-to-code comparison between two commercial general purpose multi body systems with wind turbine specific extensions (SIMPACK and alaska/Wind) and three established turbine simulation tools (Bladed, FAST, HAWC2). To this end the publicly available reference wind turbine IWT-7.5-164 model has been adapted for the considered tools, with slight modifications in the airfoil polars. The comparison itself is a thorough cross-check between the five simulation codes. The corresponding tests were defined with increasing model complexity, ranging from the static elastic deformation of a single
blade fixed at the root to the dynamic response of the wind turbine model subjected to homogeneous wind inflow. Whenever possible, the results were complemented by simulations of additional codes.