A thin-walled composite beam model for light-weighted structures interacting with fluids

摘要

A thin-walled beam model is proposed for structures of variable cross-section, which can be either open or closed and includes multicellular cross-sections with either isotropic or orthotropic materials. The proposed model does not require any priori definition of cross-sectional warping which instead results from the solution of the problem. To achieve that a special deformation pattern is superimposed on the bending deformation described by Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. All sectional properties are automatically incorporated in the analysis as a result of the usual variational formulation of the system of equations. The proposed model is specifically designed to simulate the dynamics of wind hydrokinetic turbine blade with low computational cost, especially in fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulation. A number of test cases have been carried out to validate the proposed structural model which show good agreement between the results obtained her e and the solutions available in literature. Finally, FSI simulation of a hydrokinetic blade under field condition is carried out to illustrate the capability of the current thin-walled beam model in practice. (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd.