WIND TURBINE DESIGN CODES: A COMPARISON OF THE STRUCTURAL RESPONSE

摘要

The National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is continuing a comparison of several computer codes used in the design and analysis of wind turbines. The second part of this comparison determined how well the programs predict the structural response of wind turbines. In this paper, we compare the structural response for four programs: ADAMS, BLADED; FAST AD, and YawDyn. ADAMS is a commercial, multibody-dynamics code from Mechanical Dynamics, Inc. BLADED is a commercial, performance and structural-response code from Garrad Hassan and Partners Limited. FAST_AD is a structural-response code developed by Oregon State University and the University of Utah for the NWTC. YawDyn is a structural-response code developed by the University of Utah for the NWTC. ADAMS, FAST_AD, and YawDyn use the University of Utah's AeroDyn subroutine package for calculating aerodynamic forces. Although errors were found in all the codes during this study, once they were fixed, the codes agreed surprisingly well for most of the cases and configurations we evaluated. One unresolved discrepancy between BLADED and the AeroDyn-based codes was when there was blade and/or teeter motion in addition to a large yaw error.