Quantification of Extreme-Scale Wind Turbine Performance Parameters due to Variations in Beam Properties

Abstract

As wind turbine blades grow longer to further reduce LCOE and meet the increasing need for green energy, the importance of high-performance rotor designs with optimized and well-defined structural blade properties becomes crucial. In current blade design, beam element models are widely used to reduce the computation time that would otherwise be required to run full finite element models and to also calculate the turbine response that is highly complex due to the operating conditions of the turbine. In this paper, the cross-sectional beam element properties of an extreme scale wind turbine blade are obtained through PreComp, BPE and BECAS tools are used in aero-elastic simulations to determine the effect of the differences in the beam properties on the blade performance. Thus, these evaluations provide a “blade designer” perspective about the significance of the variation in results obtained from commonly used tools. A comparison of the blade properties resultant of the PreComp, BPE and BECAS tools shows that flap-wise and edge-wise stiffness vary by up to 25% and torsion stiffness up to 69% at blade stations closest to the location of maximum chord. However, changes to the spar-cap layup of +/- 2% results in similar changes in the flap-wise and mass density properties obtained from the three different tools. Aero-elastic simulations using ElastoDyn and the blade structure input files produced with the three different tools show no significant differences in the combined root bending moment and tip out of blade deflection.

Mayank Chetan

Wind Energy Researcher

Current research interests include wind turbine structures, aero-elasticity and loads analysis.