Large eddy simulations of a utility-scale horizontal axis wind turbine including unsteady aerodynamics and fluid-structure interaction modelling

Growing horizontal axis wind turbines are increasingly exposed to significant sources of unsteadiness, such as tower shadowing, yawed or waked conditions and environmental effects. Due to increased dimensions, the use of steady tabulated airfoil coefficients to determine the airloads along long blades can be questioned in those numerical fluid models that do not have the sufficient resolution to solve explicitly and dynamically the flow close to the blade. Various models exist to describe unsteady aerodynamics (UA). However, they have been mainly implemented in engineering models, which lack the complete capability of describing the unsteady and multiscale nature of wind energy. To improve the description of the blades' aerodynamic response, a 2D unsteady aerodynamics model is used in this work to estimate the airloads of the actuator line model in our fluid-structure interaction (FSI) solver, based on 3D large eddy simulation. At each section along the actuator lines, a semi-empirical Beddoes-Leishman model includes the effects of noncirculatory terms, unsteady trailing edge separation, and dynamic stall in the dynamic evaluation of the airfoils' aerodynamic coefficients. The aeroelastic response of a utility-scale wind turbine under uniform, laminar and turbulent, sheared inflows is examined with one- and two-way FSI coupling between the blades' structural dynamics and local airloads, with and without the enhanced aerodynamics' description. The results show that the external half of the blade is dominated by aeroelastic effects, whereas the internal one is dominated by significant UA phenomena, which was possible to represent only thanks to the additional model implemented.

Automated summary

As horizontal axis wind turbines grow in size, they are exposed to various sources of unsteadiness. This study uses a 2D unsteady aerodynamics model to improve the description of blades' aerodynamic response and examines the aeroelastic response of a utility-scale wind turbine using fluid-structure interaction (FSI) solver. The results show that the external half of the blade is dominated by aeroelastic effects, while the internal half is influenced by significant unsteady aerodynamics phenomena.