UC San Diego

During the last several decades engineers and scientists put significant effort into developing reliable and efficient wind turbines. As a wind power production demands grow, the wind energy research and development need to be enhanced with high-precision methods and tools. These include time-dependent, full-scale, complex-geometry advanced computational simulations at large-scale. Those, computational analysis of wind turbines, including fluid- structure interaction simulations (FSI) at full scale is important for accurate and reliable modeling, as well as blade failure prediction and design optimization. In current dissertation the FSI framework is applied to most challenging class of problems, such as large scale horizontal axis wind turbines and vertical axis wind turbines. The governing equations for aerodynamics and structural mechanics together with coupled formulation are explained in details. The simulations are performed for different wind turbine designs, operational conditions and validated against field-test and wind tunnel experimental data