Wind power is currently one of the most reliable new energy sources serving as an alternative tofossil fuel generated electricity and is known as a widely distributed clean and renewable sourceof energy. It is now the worldβs fastest growing energy source and has also become one of themost rapidly expanding industries.The aerodynamics of a wind turbine are governed by the flow around the rotor, where theprediction of air loads on rotor blades in different operational conditions and its relation to rotorstructural dynamics is crucial for design purposes. One of the most important challenges in windturbine aerodynamics is therefore to accurately predict the forces on the blade, where the bladeand wake are modeled by different approaches such as the Blade Element Momentum (BEM)theory, the vortex method and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Here, the application ofthe vortex filament method for wind turbine aerodynamic performance is used. Different blademodels such as the lifting line and the lifting surface with prescribed and free wake models arestudied. The main purpose is to find the proper combination of blade and wake models for theaerodynamic loads as well as the computational time in order to develop an accurate and efficientaerodynamic tool. The results of the different approaches are compared with the BEM methodand GENUVP code (see the acknowledgments)
