Applied Mechanics Commons^™

Fluid–Structure Interaction Modeling Of Wind Turbines: Simulating The Full Machine, Ming-Chen Hsu, Yuri Bazilevs

Ming-Chen Hsu

In this paper we present our aerodynamics and fluid–structure interaction (FSI) computational techniques that enable dynamic, fully coupled, 3D FSI simulation of wind turbines at full scale, and in the presence of the nacelle and tower (i.e., simulation of the “full machine”). For the interaction of wind and flexible blades we employ a nonmatching interface discretization approach, where the aerodynamics is computed using a low-order finite-element-based ALE-VMS technique, while the rotor blades are modeled as thin composite shells discretized using NURBS-based isogeometric analysis (IGA). We find that coupling FEM and IGA in this manner gives a good combination of efficiency, …