Development of software for coupled aero-elastic dynamic analysis of wind turbine system

Abstract

A fully coupled aero-elastic simulation technology is developed with enough sophistication to have the features required to perform loads analyses for a variety of wind turbine configurations. Blade and tower are modeled multiple rigid bodies which are connected beam elements to represent a flexibility for their bending and torsional behaviors. AeroDyn which is developed by NREL are chosen for aerodynamic analysis. This is a popular and open code and needs hub-height wind data, full field turbulent wind data and airfoil data to calculate an aerodynamic force. DAFUL, which is a commercial multi-body and structure dynamics analysis tool, is used for multi-body dynamics analysis considering a flexibility of the blade and tower. The interface to perform coupled analysis between these two softwares is developed with a user-subroutine of vector force in DAFUL. Analysis results of a sample model to verify This proposed simulation technology is applied to the analysis of a sample model for verification of the developed program. Copyright © 2010 by The International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers.