Large Wind Turbine Rotor Design using an Aero-Elastic / Free-Wake Panel Coupling Code

Despite the advances in computing resources in the recent years, the majority of large wind-turbine rotor design problems still rely on aero-elastic codes that use blade element momentum (BEM) approaches to model the rotor aerodynamics. The present work describes an approach to wind-turbine rotor design by incorporating a higher-fidelity free-wake panel aero-elastic coupling code called MIRAS-FLEX. The optimization procedure includes a series of design load cases and a simple structural design code. Due to the heavy MIRAS-FLEX computations, a surrogate-modeling approach is applied to mitigate the overall computational cost of the optimization. Improvements in cost of energy, annual energy production, maximum flap-wise root bending moment, and blade mass were obtained for the NREL 5MW baseline wind turbine.

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