Performance Prediction of a 5MW Wind Turbine Blade Considering Aeroelastic Effect

In this study, aeroelastic response and performance analyses have been conducted for a 5MW-Class composite wind turbine blade model. Advanced coupled numerical method based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational flexible multi-body dynamics (CFMBD) has been developed in order to investigate aeroelastic responses and performance characteristics of the rotating composite blade. Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations with k-ω SST turbulence model were solved for unsteady flow problems on the rotating turbine blade model. Also, structural analyses considering rotating effect have been conducted using the general nonlinear finite element method. A fully implicit time marching scheme based on the Newmark direct integration method is applied to solve the coupled aeroelastic governing equations of the 3D turbine blade for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems. Detailed dynamic responses and instantaneous velocity contour on the blade surfaces which considering flow-separation effects were presented to show the multi-physical phenomenon of the huge rotating wind- turbine blade model.

Numerical Study of Microscale Gas Flow-Separation Using Explicit Finite Volume Method

Pressure driven microscale gas flow-separation has been investigated by solving the compressible Navier-Stokes (NS) system of equations. A two dimensional explicit finite volume (FV) compressible flow solver has been developed using modified advection upwind splitting methods (AUSM+) with no-slip/first order Maxwell-s velocity slip conditions to predict the flowseparation behavior in microdimensions. The effects of scale-factor of the flow geometry and gas species on the microscale gas flowseparation have been studied in this work. The intensity of flowseparation gets reduced with the decrease in scale of the flow geometry. In reduced dimension, flow-separation may not at all be present under similar flow conditions compared to the larger flow geometry. The flow-separation patterns greatly depend on the properties of the medium under similar flow conditions.