Introduction
With the increasing demands in energy and depletion of fossil fuels, the demand in renewable energy has grown significantly. In this regard, wind energy has become a popular source of renewable energy in recent years. To further meet the increasing demands of energy, the size of the wind turbine blades has also grown and these blades are tested to their limits structurally due to various loading and boundary conditions in different operating conditions. Usually, the safety factor approach is used to account for the uncertainties and unforeseen conditions; however, this leads to a conservative design which is heavier and cost ineffective. This demands for the implementation of a probabilistic approach so that the blades can manufactured by using less materials as possible while being robust the uncertainties.
In this regard, I developed a MATLAB based framework for aero-structural analysis of wind turbine blades during my post-doc within one year. The aero module was developed based on the blade element momentum theory using XFOIL for airfoil analysis, whereas the structural module was developed using the Ansys Parametric Language to create a fully parametric wind turbine blade made up of composites. The framework has the capability of estimating
the aerodynamic loads at different wind speed conditions, and then maps the aerodynamic load on the mesh of the finite element model of the blades for structural analysis.
The aero-structural framework was further incorporated to the stochastic optimization and uncertainty quantification framework based on PCE, Kriging, and SVMs to better understand the effects of uncertain parameters and obtain a more robust blade design that has a higher energy generation capability than the reference NREL 5 Megawatt wind turbine blade.
Duration: The framework for uncertainty quantification and stochastic optimization integrated with in-house aero-structural code was developed within one year during my post-doc in 2020.
In this regard, I developed a MATLAB based framework for aero-structural analysis of wind turbine blades during my post-doc within one year. The aero module was developed based on the blade element momentum theory using XFOIL for airfoil analysis, whereas the structural module was developed using the Ansys Parametric Language to create a fully parametric wind turbine blade made up of composites. The framework has the capability of estimating
the aerodynamic loads at different wind speed conditions, and then maps the aerodynamic load on the mesh of the finite element model of the blades for structural analysis.
The aero-structural framework was further incorporated to the stochastic optimization and uncertainty quantification framework based on PCE, Kriging, and SVMs to better understand the effects of uncertain parameters and obtain a more robust blade design that has a higher energy generation capability than the reference NREL 5 Megawatt wind turbine blade.
Duration: The framework for uncertainty quantification and stochastic optimization integrated with in-house aero-structural code was developed within one year during my post-doc in 2020.