July 01, 2024
16:15
Louvain-la-Neuve
Place des Sciences, auditorium A.03 SCES
In recent years, the size of offshore wind turbines has grown significantly. While this increases the power that can be harnessed from the wind, it also increases the flexibility of the blades, which can lead to aero-elastic effects. In this thesis, the aero-elastic effects occurring on large modern wind turbines are investigated using numerical simulations. For this purpose, a coupling between a flow solver and a structural solver is developed. The flow solver is a massively parallel code that performs large eddy simulations, and is used to model the turbulent wind and the wake. The structural solver is a non-linear beam solver that provides the structural deformations of the blades. The two solvers are coupled using the actuator line method, which computes the aerodynamic forces and models their effect on the flow. This coupling is then used to evaluate the effect of the turbine upscaling, as well as the impact of the blade flexibility on the loads and wake of large wind turbines. Finally, strategies to reduce the loads and increase the turbine lifetime are
evaluated, and flexibility is shown to play an important role when evaluating the loads.
Jury members :
- Prof. Grégoire Winckelmans (UCLouvain, Belgium), supervisor
- Prof. Philippe Chatelain (UCLouvain, Belgium), supervisor
- Prof. Paul Fisette (UCLouvain, Belgium), chairperson
- Prof. Joris Degroote (UGent, Belgium)
- Prof. Laurent Bricteux (UMons, Belgium)
- Prof. Hadrien Rattez (UCLouvain, Belgium)
- Dr. Georg Pirrung (DTU, Denmark)