When designing a wind turbine, the ultimate goal is to find the design that yields the maximum incomewith the lowest cost. This often implies trade-off decisions that must be assessed by a computer, sincethey involve many disciplines. For this reason, a tool aiming to optimise the design a wind turbineblade was studied and improved. The way in which the numerical parameters affect the final result wasinvestigated. Moreover, a method to correlate the static and design loads was implemented. Finally, thestructural module was updated in order to include a more detailed analysis
Rotor design is a multidisciplinary task that requires information on power and noise performance, structures, loads and an estimated system cost. The task of designing a new turbine involves trade-offs and the understanding of what is the required level of detail in the modeling at which the calculations are meaningful for a certain rotor concept.This assignment will explore different turbine concepts and the effect of some of the modeling choices in the optimization results. The first investigations will be related to discretization and numerical optimization options. Then the work will continue exploring the effect of different targets in the optimization (e.g. investigate the effect of root flow modeling and swirl in the root chords and total weight, compare optimization results for a turbine in 2 different site conditions and a hybrid optimization, implications of rotor size in the optimization with a constrained gear box for a low turbulence site).The work will also involve the extension of some of the modules in the current optimization work (e.g. coupling a new routine for loads or noise improved assessment and check its effect on the final optimized results).This work will be developed mainly using Matlab and Python. Most of the tools and information used as input will be confidential.
