Numerical Fluid-Structure Interaction Study on the NREL 5MW HAWT

The development of reliable Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) simulation tools and models for the wind turbines is a critical step in the design procedure towards achieving optimized large wind turbine structures. Such approach will mitigate the aeroelastic instabilities like: torsional flutter, stall flutter and edgewise instability that introduce extra stresses to the turbine structure leading to reduced life time and substantial failures.

In this study, FSI simulations were held using the commercial package Ansys v18.2 solvers as a preliminary step towards our on-going development of a reliable Open-Source solver. These simulations were applied to the full-scale rotor blades of the NREL 5MW reference horizontal axis wind turbine. The aerodynamic loads and structural responses computations were carried out using a steady-state FSI analysis.

The computations were run on the Kyushu University multi-core Linux cluster using the public domain openMPI implementation of the standard message passing interface (MPI). Finally, the results were validated against the Technical University of Denmark’s (DTU) MIRAS aeroelastic code results as well as the widely used FLEX5-Q3UIC and FAST codes in different cases showing reasonable agreement.