• Wind and Structures
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.95-108
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• 2006

Wind turbines are highly complex structures for numerical flow simulation. They normally comprise of a turbine mounted on a tower thus the movement of the turbine blades and the blade/tower interaction must be captured. In addition the ground effect should also be included. There are many more important features of wind turbines and it is difficult to include all of them. A simplified set of features is chosen here for both the turbine and the tower to show how the method can begin to identify the main points connected with wind turbine wake generation and tip vortex tower interaction. An approach to modelling the rotating blades of a turbine is proposed here. The model uses point forces based on blade element theory to model the blades and takes into account their time dependent motion. This means that local instantaneous velocities can be used as a basis for the blade element theory. The model is incorporated into a large eddy simulation code and, although many important features are left out of the model, the velocity/power performance relation is generally of the correct order of magnitude. Suggested improvements to the method are discussed.

• Journal of Wind Energy
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.61-67
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• 2011

In the present study, numerical unsteady simulations of the NREL Phase VI wind turbine in downwind operation conditions were conducted to investigate rotor-tower interaction. The calculations were performed using an unstructured mesh, incompressible Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes flow solver. To capture the unsteady effects associated with the tower shadow between the rotor blades and the tower, the wind turbine was modelled including the rotor, tower, hub, and nacelle. The present results generally showed good agreements with available experimental data. At the lowest wind speed, the pressure distribution was characterized by a complete collapse of the suction peak on the blade when the blade passes through the tower wake. It was found that unsteady effects play a significant role in the response of the blades.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.511-524
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• 2020

Advancements in materialistic life styles and increasing awareness about adverse climatic changes and its negative effects on human life have been the driving force of finding new and clean sources of energy. Wind power has become technologically mature and commercially acceptable on global scale. However, fossil fuels have been the major sources of energy in most countries, renewable energy (particularly wind) is now booming worldwide. To cope with this wind energy technology, various related aspects have to be understood by the scientific, engineering, utility, and contracting communities. This study is an effort towards the understanding of the (i) wind turbine blade and tower structural stability issues, (ii) turbine blade and tower failures and remedial measures, (iii) weather and seismic effects on turbine blade and tower failures, (iv) gear box failures, and (v) turbine blade and tower failure analysis tools.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.17-27
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• 2017

The treatment of rotor wake has been a critical issue in the field of the rotor aerodynamics. This paper presents a new free wake model for the unsteady analysis for a wind turbine. A blade-wake-tower interaction is major source of unsteady aerodynamic loading and noise on the wind turbine. However, this interaction can not be considered in conventional free wake model. Thus, the free wake model named Finite Vortex Element (FVE hereafter) was devised in order to consider the interaction effects. In this new free wake model, the wake-tower interaction was described by dividing one vortex filament into two vortex filaments, when the vortex filament collided with a tower. Each divided vortex filaments were remodeled to make vortex ring and horseshoe vortex to satisfy Kelvin's circulation theorem and Helmholtz's vortex theorem. This model was then used to predict aerodynamic load and wake geometry for the horizontal axis wind turbine. The results of the FVE model were compared with those of the conventional free wake model and the experimental results of SNU wind tunnel test and NREL wind tunnel test under various inflow velocity and yaw condition. The result of the FVE model showed better correlation with experimental data. It was certain that the tower interaction has a strong effect on the unsteady aerodynamic load of blades. Thus, the tower interaction needs to be taken into account for the unsteady load prediction. As a result, this research shows a potential of the FVE for an efficient and versatile numerical tool for unsteady loading analysis of a wind turbine.

• New & Renewable Energy
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• v.1 no.1 s.1
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• pp.54-63
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• 2005

A critical issue in the field of the rotor aerodynamics is the treatment of the wake. The wake is of primary importance in determining overall aerodynamic behavior, especially, a wind turbine blade includes the unsteady airloads problem. In this study, the wake generated by blades are depicted by a free wake model to analyse unsteady loading on blade and a new free wake model named Finite Vortex Element(FVE hereafter) is devised in order to include a wake-tower interaction. In this new free wake model, blade-wake-tower interaction is described by cutting a vortex filament when the filament collides with a tower. This FVE model is compared with a conventional free wake model and verified by a comparison with NRELand SNU wind tunnel model. A comparison with NREL and SNU data shows validity and effectiveness of devised FVE free wake model and an efficient.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2009.04a
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• pp.416-422
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• 2009

Offshore wind turbine are subjected to more various loads than general land structures and the stability of structures is supported by the piles driven deeply in the subsoil. So it is more important for offshore structures to consider seabed soil-structure interaction than land structures. And the response of a fixed offshore structure supported by pile foundations is affected by resist dynamics lateral loading due to wave forces and ocean environmental loads. In this study, offshore wind tower response are calculated in the time domain using a finite element package(ANSYS 11.0). Several parameters affecting the vibration characteristics of the natural frequency and mode shape and the tower response have been investigated.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.261-264
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• 2006

This paper describes the effects to wind turbine blade aerodynamics due to interaction between blade and tower on upwind type HAWT. In order to analyze effects of blade-tower interact ion, the analyst s program WINFAS which is based on VLM(Vortex Lattice Method), Free wake and FVE model is used. In this study, the changes of wind turbine blade aerodynamics caused by blade-tower interact ion are Investigated with various parameters windshear, yaw error, TSR and tower diameter.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.1-12
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• 2012

In this study, an analysis method for the earthquake response of an offshore wind turbine model is developed, considering the effects of the fluid-structure-soil interaction. The turbine is modeled as a tower with a lumped mass at the top of it. The tower is idealized as a tubular cantilever founded on flexible seabed. Substructure and Rayleigh-Ritz methods are used to derive the governing equation of a coupled structure-fluid-soil system incorporating interactions between the tower and sea water and between the foundation and the flexible seabed. The sea water is assumed to be a compressible but non-viscous ideal fluid. The impedance functions of a rigid footing in water-saturated soil strata are obtained from the Thin-Layer Method (TLM) and combined with the superstructure model. The developed method is applied to the earthquake response analysis of an offshore wind turbine model. The method is verified by comparing the results with reference solutions. The effects of several factors, such as the flexibility of the tower, the depth of the sea water, and the stiffness of the soil, are examined and discussed. The relative significance of the fluid-structure interaction over the soil-structure interaction is evaluated and vice versa.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.81-87
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• 2018

The seismic response, the natural frequencies and the mode shapes of an offshore wind turbine with twisted tripod substructure subject to various pile-ground interactions are discussed in this paper. The acceleration responses of the tower head by four historical earthquakes are presented as the seismic response, while the other loads are assumed as ambient loads. For the pile-ground interactions, the fixed, linear and nonlinear models are employed to simulate the interactions and the p-y, t-z and Q-z curves are utilized for the linear and nonlinear models. The curves are designed for stiff, medium and soft clays, and thus, the seven types of the pile-ground interactions are used to compare the seismic response, the acceleration of the tower head. The mode shapes are similar to each other for all types of pile-ground interactions. The natural frequencies, however, are almost same for the three clay types of the linear model, while the natural frequency of the fixed support model is quite different from that of the linear interaction model. The wind turbine with the fixed support model has the biggest magnitude of acceleration. In addition, the nonlinear model is more sensitive to the stiffness of clay than the linear pile-ground interaction model.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.727-753
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• 2015

A double-skinned composite tubular (DSCT) wind power tower was suggested and automatic section design software was developed. The developed software adopted the nonlinear material model and the nonlinear column model. If the outer diameter, material properties and design capacities of a DSCT wind power tower are given, the developed software performs axial force-bending moment interaction analyses for hundreds of sections of the tower and suggests ten optimized cross-sectional designs. In this study, 80 sections of DSCT wind power towers were designed for 3.6 MW and 5.0 MW turbines. Moreover, the performances of the 80 designed sections were analyzed with and without considerations of large displacement effect. In designing and analyzing them, the material nonlinearity and the confining effect of concrete were considered. The comparison of the analysis results showed the moment capacity loss of the wind power tower by the mass of the turbine is significant and the large displacement effect should be considered for the safe design of the wind power tower.