Towards the development of an advanced wind turbine rotor design tool integrating full CFD and FEM

Abstract

Large, highly flexible wind turbines of the new generation will make designers face un-precedent challenges, mainly connected to their huge dimensions. To tackle these challenges, it is commonly acknowledged that design tools must evolve in the direction of both improving their accuracy and turning into holistic, multiphysics tools. Furthermore, the wind turbine industry is reaching a high level of maturity, and ever more accurate and reliable design tools are required to further optimise these machines. Within this framework, the study shows the development of an integrated platform for blade design integrating 3D CFD flow simulations and 3D-FEM structural analysis. Artificial intelligence techniques are applied to develop an optimization procedure based on the proposed tool. The potential of the new platform has been tested on the well-known test case of the MEXICO rotor, for which an optimization of the blade design has been carried out. Exploring a design space sampled with 2000 CFD and FEM computations, increases in blade torque have been obtained at each of the three tip-speed ratios (TSR) investigated, ranging from 6% at the nominal TSR to 14% at the lowest one, while stresses on the blade are kept almost unaltered.