Multiple limit cycle amplitudes in high-fidelity predictions of standstill wind turbine blade vibrations

In this study, vortex-induced vibrations (VIVs) on the IEA 10 MW blade are investigated using two methodologies in order to assess strengths and weaknesses of the two simulation types. Both fully coupled fluid–structure interaction (FSI) simulations and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with forced motion of the blade are used and compared. It is found that for the studied cases with high inclination angles, the forced-motion simulations succeed in capturing the power injection by the aerodynamics, despite the motion being simplified. From the fully coupled simulations, a dependency on initial conditions of the vibrations was found, showing that cases which are stable if unperturbed might go into large VIVs if provoked initially by, for instance, inflow turbulence or turbine operations. Depending on the initial vibration amplitudes, multiple limit cycle levels can be triggered, for the same flow case, due to the non-linearity of the aerodynamics. By fitting a simple damping model for the specific blade and mode shape from FSI simulations, it is also demonstrated that the equilibrium limit cycle amplitudes between power injection and dissipation can be estimated using forced-motion simulations, even for the multiple stable vibration cases, with good agreement with fully coupled simulations. Finally, a time series generation from forced-motion simulations and the simple damping model is presented, concluding that CFD amplitude sweeps can estimate not only the final limit cycle oscillation amplitude, but also the vibration build-up time series.