Studies on Vertical Axis Wind Turbines Technologies

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The aeroelastic and aero-acoustic behaviour of Darrieus-type vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) individually and in wind farm formations will be investigated. Darrieus wind turbines were common in the 1970's but they were phase out due to problems with excessive vibrations. Advances in "smart" control systems and blade pitch control to suppress vibrations and the advent of composite blade structures have revitalized this conceptual design nowadays. In addition, the necessity of building offshore wind farms in deeper water to minimize the unavoidable visual and noise pollution near populated areas have pushed the industry to consider floating wind turbines. Horizontal axis wind turbines are not appropriate to floating installations due to its inherent stability problems.******The "troposkien" (from the Greek "rotating rope") geometry minimizes the fatigue of the Darrieus blade. The structural dynamic behavior of the "troposkien" blade under the action of the unsteady aerodynamics will be investigated considering the non-linear effects due to both the structural curvature of the blade and the aerodynamic dynamic stall present in regions of the blade azimuth angle. The structural dynamics will be expressed in a state-vector mixed formulation form where both forces and displacements in the in- and out-plane directions will be considered as the dependent variables. The aerodynamic simulation of the VAWT will be developed incorporating a free-wake vortex model where each blade section will shed vortices due to the changes in the blade lift over time. The shed vortices (filaments or alternatively particles) will be let to evolve over space in a Lagrangian description of the flow by the velocity field induced by both the vorticity of the neighbouring vortices and the wind free speed. Tower (blunt-body) effects will be included for a better description of the flow. This numerical approach is computationally efficient to represent the free-wake in rotating wings as it is mash-less and so robust to unrealistic numerical dissipation of the vortex strength normally encountered in traditional (grid-based) computational fluid dynamics methods. Coupling the aforementioned models for the structure and the aerodynamics both the self-excited (flutter and limit cycle oscillations) and the aeroelastic forced response of the structure due to the unsteady dynamic and aerodynamic loading will be investigated numerically. Aero-acoustic emissions generated by the unsteady acoustic pressure on the blades will also be determined from the blade local lift to estimate the turbine noise footprint and compared with experimental data from wind tunnel tests with a scaled turbine instrumented with strain gauges. The final objective of the project will be to develop "smart" control systems to minimize the high vibration problems detected with earlier installations of the Darrieurs rotor.