Vortex Method Application for Aerodynamic Loads on Rotor Blades

Paper in proceeding, 2013

Today, wind power is one of the most reliable new energy source serving as an alternative to fossil-fuel generated electricity and is known as widely-distributed clean and renewable energy source. It is now the world’s fastest growing energy source and has also become one of the most rapidly expanding industries. The aerodynamics of a wind turbine are governed by the flow around the rotor where the prediction of air loads on rotor blades in different operational conditions and its relation to rotor structural dynamics is crucial for design purposes. Therefore, one of the most important challenges in wind turbine aerodynamics is to predict the forces on the blade accurately where the blade and wake are modeled by different approaches such as Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory, vortex method and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). In this paper, the application of vortex method for wind turbine aerodynamic performance is used. Different blade models such as lifting line and lifting surface with prescribed wake model are studied. The main purpose is to find the proper combination of blade and wake model influencing the aerodynamic loads as well as the computational time efficiency. The results of different approaches are compared with the GENUVP code. (See acknowledgements)