Design Oriented Aerodynamic Modelling of Wind Turbine Performance

The development of a wind turbine aerodynamics model using a Boundary Integral Equation model (BIEM) is presented. The methodology is valid to study inviscid unsteady flows around three dimensional bodies of arbitrary shape and arbitrarily moving with respect to the incoming flow. The extension of this methodology to study viscosity effects in turbine blade flow at high angle of attack is addressed and an approach to determine aerodynamic loads over a wide range of turbine operating conditions is proposed. Numerical applications considering a selected test cases from the NREL experimental dataset are presented. Finally, the application of the proposed turbine aerodynamics model into a multi-disciplinary study including aeroelasticity of pylon-turbine assembly and aeroacoustics modelling of induced noise is briefly described.