Fluid Structure Interactions for Wind Turbines

Se engelsk versjon.

The deep sea offshore wind potential is huge, but will only be realised provided that costs are reduced to a competitive level. This project addresses exactly this, presenting results on technical issues related to the core of wind energy i.e. the convers ion of kinetic energy from the wind into mechanical energy that is used to produce electricity. By enabling more understanding of the physics behind the wind turbine interaction through detailed fluid-strucutre interction simulation we may increase the co mpetence in developing more optimized wind turbines as well as more yielding wind farm layouts. Numerical simulation tools are an invaluable way of gaining new insights into these issues with the possibility of integrating many physical models influencin g the performance of the wind turbine. Up to now the integrated numerical simulation tools used by the wind energy industry apply simplified empirical or parametrized models to compute the aerodynamical forces on the turbine blades. Simplified numerical m odels are computationally efficient, but important details of the flow field and nonlinearities in the interaction of the air flow and rotor blades are not resolved. Coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations are needed for accurate modelling of wind turbines, and also to provide input parameters, to verify and to improve parametrized models. Detailed FSI analysis will be even more important in the design of offshore wind turbines because of the extreme wind conditions at sea. New methods fo r accurate, robust and efficient simulation of FSI for wind turbines will be developed in the project. The methods will be implemented to form a state-of-the-art numerical simulation tool for coupled FSI simulations of a full scale rotor utilizing the com putational power of modern parallel hardware architectures. Furthermore, the atmospheric interaction is important and will be taken into consideration by establishing representative input profiles.