Modelling, analysis and options for improvement of horizontal axis wind turbine design

Abstract

Eolic technology is considered one of the most promising areas of renewable energy sources. However, the manufacturing and installation of wind turbines are quite costly and produce pollutants. Furthermore, wind turbines are subject to different and sometimes unknown types of aerodynamic loadings in their life time operation. The objective of this paper is to model, simulate and analyse the response of a computer modelled HAWT and eventually propose and study options for its improvement, primarily through the introduction of modern blade airfoils. The modelling and simulation (M&S) stage encompasses the use of computer-aided design (CAD) applications for constructing the model as well as computational tools like the finite element method (FEM), the blade element method (BEM), the Newmark method, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and others for simulating and analysing the response of the HAWT both in its default design configuration and in the improved design configuration. The computational tools are properly combined so that on one hand to be able to compare the results for the proposed cases and on the other hand to be more computationally effective. The effectiveness pursuit is both in time and in the available hardware resources.