Efficient aeroelastic modelling of highly-flexible wind turbines

The design of wind turbine blades is tending to larger and softer blades which is increasing structural deformations and aerodynamic unsteadiness and three-dimensional effects. These effects define the aeroelastic behaviour of current and future wind turbines and, thus, the structural and aerodynamic models should be chosen accordingly. To that effect, SHARPy implements geometrically exact beam theory (GEBT) and unsteady vortex-lattice methods (UVLM).

In this presentation, a comparison of the forces obtained with SHARPy and OpenFAST is shown for uniform, shear, yaw and turbulent cases. Moreover, turbulent cases have also been computed with a reduced order model. This was created from UVLM aerodynamics with the frequency-limitted balanced truncation method.