Effects of structure flexibility on horizontal axis wind turbine performances

This work illustrates the effects of flexibility of rotor blades and turbine tower on the performances of an horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) designed by our ADAG research group, by means of several example applied on a recent project for a active pitch controlled upwind 60 kW HAWT. The influence of structural flexibility for blade only, tower only and blade coupled with tower configuration is investigated using an aero-elastic computer-aided engineering (CAE) tool for horizontal axis wind turbines named FAST developed at National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of USA. For unsteady inflow conditions in front of the isolated HAWT the performances in rigid and flexible operation mode are computed and compared in order to illustrate the limitation included within a classical rigid body approach to wind turbine simulation.