A progressive increasing in turbine dimension has characterized the
technological evelopment in offshore wind energy utilization. This aspect reflects on
the growing in blade length and weight. For very large turbines, the standard control systems may
not be optimal to give the best performance and the best vibratory load damping, keeping the
condition of maximum energy production. For this reason, some new solutions have been
proposed in research. One of these is the possibility of morphs the blade surface in an active way
(increasing the performance in low wind region) or passive (load reduction) way.
In this work, we present a numerical study on the active and passive trailing edge
morphing, applied to large wind turbines. In particular, the study focuses on the aerodynamic
response of a midspan blade section, in terms of fluid structure interaction (FSI) and driven
surface deformation.
We test the active system in a simple start-up procedure and the passive system in a power
production with turbulent wind conditions, that is, two situations in which we expect these systems
could improve the performance.
All the computations are carried out with a FSI code, which couples a 2D-CFD solver, a moving mesh
solver (both implemented in OpenFOAM library) and a FEM solver.
We evaluate all the boundary conditions to apply in the section problem by simulating the
5MW NREL wind turbine with the NREL CAE-tools developed for wind turbine simulation