Investigation of the validity of BEM for simulation of wind turbines in complex load cases and comparison with experiment and CFD

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate the validity of simulation codes based on the Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory for three important design load conditions. This paper includes the cases of yawed inflow, rotor tower interaction for downwind turbines and the standstill case. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and experimental data (when available) are used for the evaluation of the obtained results. For the yawed inflow, the results indicate that significant deviations between BEM and experiments & CFD can be observed. This discrepancy is caused by unsteady phenomena such as the advancing & retreating blade effect and the skewed wake effect. In the case of the rotor and tower interaction of the downwind turbine, the results show that the BEM based code overpredicts the sectional forces in terms of the normal and tangential forces by 20%. In the case of standstill, the evaluation of the results based on tip deflections shows clear differences in the output of both numerical approaches. While the flapwise deflections show a reasonable agreement, the CFD-based coupled solver predicts much larger edgewise vibrations.