1d to 3d mapping of wind turbine blade structural behavior using a coupling method

Humankind depend heavily on fossil fuels. It is only a matter of time before these fuels run out. Due to this growing concern, different renewable sources of energy have been tried and used by different nations. Wind power is a great example as a renewable source of energy which might be able to meet the worldwide rising demand of electricity. Wind turbines offer a means to convert kinetic energy of wind into mechanical energy and eventually into electricity. Designing a wind turbine involves overcoming many engineering challenges such as structural dynamics, aerodynamics, control and electrical system, also, hydrodynamics in offshore projects. In order to overcome these engineering challenges wind industry relies on computer-aided-engineering (CAE) tools such as FAST. FAST is a simulator tool, which is a modular assembly of advanced CAE codes. NuMAD, BeamDyn and other key simulators were also investigated along with MPC in mechanical APDL because they were all part of experimental chapter of this thesis. Main aim of this thesis was to turn FAST's 1-Dimensional blade outputs to a 3-Dimensional model and calculate the stress experienced by the blade structure. NREL's 5MW-baseline wind turbine was chosen as the model for this thesis. Structural and aerodynamic properties of the 5MW-baseline blade were obtained from FAST files. NREL's 5MW-baseline blade was created by using NuMAD. After creating the blade model in NuMAD, input files for FAST and Mechanical APDL were extracted from NuMAD. In mechanical APDL, masternodes were added to the model at crucial stations of the blade structure. Then, masternodes were coupled by using MPC generator. Blade model was solved and structural behavior of the MPC model under pressure were calculated in APDL. Obtained displacements were applied to each masternode accordingly and blade model was solved again. Experimenting on different models in APDL was continued until differences between displacement and stress results of these 2 coupled models were reasonably small. Finally, General input file of FAST and BeamDyn input file were adjusted and 5MW-baseline wind turbine model was solved through FAST. From outputs created by BeamDyn, displacement data of blades were obtained. These displacements were implemented to coupled model's masternodes and stress results were calculated by APDL which brought an end to this thesis. This study can be extended in several ways. First a stress calculating simulator for FAST can be developed. Second, coupling method can be improved. Additionally, placing masternodes could be done in a more effective way.