Abstract
With the growth of the wind energy industry, it has become apparent that gear boxes in wind turbines, which link the blades to the generator, tend to wear down faster than anticipated. This phenomenon is not clearly understood; one theory is that existing wind turbine modeling approaches used to design the turbines do not properly account for nonlinearities caused by large amplitude blade deformations. To help understand the effects of geometric nonlinearities, a finite element based code, NLBeam, has been developed to simulate structural dynamic responses of wind turbine blades by employing the geometrically exact beam theory. This research focuses on assessing the adequacy of NLBeam by comparing simulation to experimental results. Three aluminum blade surrogates with different geometries were tested by applying large amplitude base excitations while assuring the surrogates stayed within the elastic range. A variety of orientations were utilized changing the dynamic characteristics of the surrogates and reflecting actual turbine blade behavior. The results are used to guide future development of NLBeam which will be coupled with large scale simulations of wind plants in a Computational Fluid Dynamics based program developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory called WindBlade.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Engineering Institute (Dr. Charles Farrar, Director) for providing the funding to perform this research, as well as Vibrant Technologies and Simulia for their kind donation of software, MEScope and Abaqus, respectively, which was integral in the completion of this study. DJL wishes to acknowledge the financial support of LANL’s Intelligent Wind Turbine Lab Directed Research and Development program (Dr. Curtt Ammerman, PI).
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Dalton, S., Monahan, L., Stevenson, I., Luscher, D.J., Park, G., Farinholt, K. (2012). Towards the Experimental Assessment of NLBeam for Modeling Large Deformation Structural Dynamics. In: Mayes, R., et al. Topics in Experimental Dynamics Substructuring and Wind Turbine Dynamics, Volume 2. Conference Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2422-2_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2422-2_17
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