Vortex-induced vibrations of wind turbines: From single blade to full rotor simulations

Vortex-induced vibrations (VIVs) of wind turbine blades are a phenomenon that cannot be predicted sufficiently accurate by low fidelity methods. High fidelity methods, such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) coupled to a structural solver come at a high computational cost. Most studies of the phenomenon have so far focused on analysis of single blades. For these cases, the so-called forced-motion method of prescribing the blade motion according to structural modeshapes has proven effective.

In this article, VIVs of the IEA 10 MW reference turbine is studied in a fluid–structure interaction setup, where the structural dynamics of the full turbine are represented in the structural solver and the full rotor aerodynamics are simulated in the CFD solver. Due to the high computational cost this study is limited to only a single case with the rotor in bunny configuration, 80 degrees pitch and 90 degrees yaw. Also the purely structural power dissipation of the full turbine is studied to enable full rotor forced-motion in future work. A blade tip amplitude of roughly 17 meters is reached in the full turbine simulations, which is a significantly larger limit cycle amplitude than what would be reached in a corresponding isolated single blade simulation. The analysis also shows that forced-motion simulations combining three single blades vibrating according to the structural modeshape would be feasible. It is further observed, that the power injection or extraction close to the blade tip may change drastically at very large amplitudes compared to lower amplitudes.
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