Free/Open Source Multibody and Aerodynamic Software for Aeroelastic Analysis of Wind Turbines

This work developed a free/open source simulation software for wind turbines, based on coupling a free general-purpose multibody dynamics software developed at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, with an open-source software library for wind turbine aerodynamics developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in USA. The verification results show that this free/open source simulation software provides the capability to simulate the dynamic behavior of arbitrarily complex systems like wind turbine system with an unparalleled level of access to the source code. This also gives the wind turbine designers the flexibility to simulate their own special design cases by either modifying the source code or just combining different modules of this free/open source simulation software.