Assessment of a Fast and Versatile Aeroelastic Platform for On/Off-shore Wind Turbine Analysis

To effectively calculate the dynamic response of wind turbine rotors, the present paper proposes fast and reliable, Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) tool AEOLIAN (AErOeLastic sImulAtioN) able to handle complex geometries within the framework of MATLAB Simulink/Simscape-Multibody©. Specifically, a two-way strongly-coupled partitioned FSI approach is herein described and validated against literature results concerning NREL 5 MW horizontal axis wind turbine rotor in different operating conditions of increasing complexity. Limiting the interest to the design and nearly-design working conditions, conventional Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory is coupled with a Lumped Mass approach combined with a MultiBody-based discretization method. Throughout the paper, AEOLIAN results shall concern bottom-fixed conditions at uniform and sheared inflow, as well as a floating set of computations considering pitch and surge motions. AEOLIAN computations shall be compared to a host of available results, of varied fidelity. Through a detailed assessment, limits and potentialities of this aeroelastic formulation are shown.