Wind energy

We calculate the deflection of large composite wind turbine blades and the motion and deformation of airborne wind energy systems.

Magnitude of the blade deflection of a wind turbine with 100m diameter, with a separate overset mesh for each blade and detailed modelling of the composite material.

Published in G. Santo, M. Peeters, W. Van Paepegem, and J. Degroote. Effect of rotor-tower interaction, tilt angle and yaw misalignment on the aeroelasticity of a large horizontal axis wind turbine with composite blades. Wind Energy, 23(7):1578–1595, 2020. doi: 10.1002/we.2501.

Visualization of the pressure distribution on the airborne wind energy system while flying a cross-wind flight maneuver. The pressure distribution changes during the course of the maneuver and has an asymmetrical distribution due to the higher speed of the outboard wing part.

Published in N. Pynaert, T. Haas, J. Wauters, G. Crevecoeur, and J. Degroote. Wing deformation of an airborne wind energy system in crosswind flight using high-fidelity fluid-structure interaction. Energies, 16(2):1–16, 2023. doi: 10.3390/en16020602.

Contour plot of wind velocity field in a plane parallel (left) and perpendicular (right) to the wind direction during the course of the cross-wind flight maneuver. It shows the induction of the AWE system on the uniform wind field.

Visualization of the wingtip vortices of the AWE system using the normalized q-criterion. The wingtip vortices follow the shape of the flight path but are convected downstream.