Development of a second-order dynamic stall model

Abstract

Dynamic stall phenomena carry the risk of negative damping and instability in wind turbine blades. It is crucial to model these phenomena accurately to reduce inaccuracies in predicting design driving (fatigue and extreme) loads. Some of the inaccuracies in current dynamic stall models may be due to the fact that they are not properly designed for high angles of attack and that they do not specifically describe vortex shedding behaviour. The Snel second-order dynamic stall model attempts to explicitly model unsteady vortex shedding. This model could therefore be a valuable addition to a turbine design software such as Bladed. In this paper the model has been validated with oscillating aerofoil experiments, and improvements have been proposed for reducing inaccuracies. The proposed changes led to an overall reduction in error between the model and experimental data. Furthermore the vibration frequency prediction improved significantly. The improved model has been implemented in Bladed and tested against small-scale turbine experiments at parked conditions. At high angles of attack the model looks promising for reducing mismatches between predicted and measured (fatigue and extreme) loading, leading to possible lower safety factors for design and more cost-efficient designs for future wind turbines.