Wind turbines
This project is done in collaboration with VALOREM, a green energy producer located in France. The initial goal was to optimise the design of wind turbine blades to maximise the power extracted. Since VALOREM has already lot of existing wind turbine farms, the best solution is to modify existing blades adding extender and aerodynamic appendices. Since the numerical costs to solve an optimisation with millions of degrees of freedom is too expensive, we design a simple model based on Blade Element Momentum (BEM) and Generalized Active Disk called VALDAG. Using this simple model we have optimized the global twist. This new blade has been tested and validated using the detailed model with the NaSCar solver. The figure below shows the flow around the optimized wind turbine rotor.
The figure below shows the interactions between blades, hub and mast.
In order to evaluate the aerodynamics effects on the structure of the blades, a dynamic beam model with axial, torsional and flexural deformations have been implemented.
Dynamic beam model with axial, torsional and flexural deformations (displacements amplified for visualisation)
