David's blog

I have a 3D model in Abaqus of a wind turbine rotor, modelled with shell elements (S4R and S3). To use the same blade in an aeroelastic wind turbine code (HAWC2 from Risoe), I want to convert selected cross sections of the 3D model to Timoshenko beam elements.

In a previous post some months ago (see here), I mentioned some of the questions I had considering the aeroelastic response of a wind turbine rotor. In this post I just want to give, for those interested, a brief status report.

For my graduation work (student at the Delft university of Technology, The Netherlands), I am trying to model the aeroelastic behavior of a wind turbine rotor. For this end I use an Abaqus model of a wind turbine blade (which is a composite structure with different fiber layers and corresponding orientation). The aerodynamic force is calculated by a BEM code (Blade Element Momentum theory), which is a simplified engineering aerodynamic code: fast but still quite good. Using CFD to calculate the loads is out of the question since it requires far too much time to calculate.