Experiment-based assessment of NLBeam for modeling geometrically nonlinear dynamic deformations

Abstract

As the wind energy industry expands, larger wind turbines are being developed to harvest more energy for a given plant site. It has also been noted that gear boxes within the wind turbines are wearing out faster than expected. One possible explanation is that current modeling approaches employed in wind turbine design do not adequately account for nonlinearities associated with the large deformations in wind turbine blades. A finite element code, NLBeam, has been developed to account for nonlinearities using geometrically exact beam theory. To validate the code, experiments were conducted on a surrogate aluminum blade and the results were compared to simulation results from NLBeam. Further development of the NLBeam code will be based off of this research. In the future, NLBeam will be coupled with WindBlade, a computational fluid dynamics based software which has been developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory to study fluid-structure interaction between turbines within wind plants. © The Society for Experimental Mechanics Inc. 2013.