Abstract
As the wind energy industry expands, larger wind turbines are being developed to harvest more energy for a given plant site. It has also been noted that gear boxes within the wind turbines are wearing out faster than expected. One possible explanation is that current modeling approaches employed in wind turbine design do not adequately account for nonlinearities associated with the large deformations in wind turbine blades. A finite element code, NLBeam, has been developed to account for nonlinearities using geometrically exact beam theory. To validate the code, experiments were conducted on a surrogate aluminum blade and the results were compared to simulation results from NLBeam. Further development of the NLBeam code will be based off of this research. In the future, NLBeam will be coupled with WindBlade, a computational fluid dynamics based software which has been developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory to study fluid-structure interaction between turbines within wind plants.
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Acknowledgements
Dangora, Harvie, and Wichman would like to acknowledge the Engineering Institute at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Dr. Charles Farrar, Director) for providing the funding and equipment used in conducting this research. The authors gratefully acknowledge Ian Fleming, Dr. Steve Anton, and Dr. Francois Hemez for their training, support, and expertise, respectively. Luscher is grateful for the support of the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project on Intelligent Wind Turbines (IWT) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Dr. Curtt Ammerman, PI).
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© 2013 The Society for Experimental Mechanics, Inc.
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Dangora, L., Harvie, J., Wichman, K., Luscher, D.J. (2013). Experiment-Based Assessment of NLBeam for Modeling Geometrically Nonlinear Dynamic Deformations. In: Kerschen, G., Adams, D., Carrella, A. (eds) Topics in Nonlinear Dynamics, Volume 1. Conference Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics Series, vol 35. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6570-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6570-6_4
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