Over the past 50 years, there have been radical developments in wind turbines design. The machines have developed from 34 m rotor diameter 100 KW machines to today’s 120 m rotor diameter 6 MW machines. The most vital component responsible for the downtime of wind turbines is the gearbox. Further, gearbox replacement and lubrication account for 38% of the parts cost for the entire turbine system. The speed of the scale-up has had a strong impact on the design process of these machines, which calls for a more accurate simulation tool that takes into account aerodynamics and structural dynamics interaction.

As existing tools usually were based on the fast but simple Blade-Element-Momentum theory (BEM) and were using very few modal degrees of freedom, a necessity existed for more accurate simulation tools — tools that fully considered the interaction of aerodynamics and structural dynamics. The next logical step for improving the accuracy of aeroelastic simulations was the coupling of a free vortex wake module and a multibody simulation code.

To find out more about the coupling of a free vortex wake module and a multibody simulation code using Simpack, read the article ‘Aeroelastic Simulation of Wind Turbines by Coupling a Free Vortex Wake Model with Simpack’.  Author: Daniel Kaufer, Universität of Stuttgart, Germany.

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Simpack MBS, Simpack, MBS, Multibody System Simulation, Multibody Simulation, FEA, Finite Element Analysis, Computational Fluid Dynamics Simpack News, Wind Turbines, Dynamics, Load, Loading