Stochastic model for aerodynamic force dynamics on wind turbine blades in unsteady wind inflow

TL;DR

This paper introduces a stochastic model for more accurately estimating aerodynamic forces on wind turbine blades in unsteady wind conditions, enhancing traditional methods by capturing local force fluctuations.

Contribution

The paper integrates a stochastic lift and drag model into AeroDyn, providing a novel approach to simulate dynamic force fluctuations on wind turbine blades under unsteady wind inflow.

Findings

Stochastic model produces extended dynamic response in force fluctuations.

Statistical analysis shows consistent results with classical models.

Model improves understanding of local force dynamics in unsteady winds.

Abstract

The paper presents a stochastic approach to estimate the aerodynamic forces with local dynamics on wind turbine blades in unsteady wind inflow. This is done by integrating a stochastic model of lift and drag dynamics for an airfoil into the aerodynamic simulation software AeroDyn. The model is added as an alternative to the static table lookup approach in blade element momentum (BEM) wake model used by AeroDyn. The stochastic forces are obtained for a rotor blade element using full field turbulence simulated wind data input and compared with the classical BEM and dynamic stall models for identical conditions. The comparison shows that the stochastic model generates additional extended dynamic response in terms of local force fluctuations. Further, the comparison of statistics between the classical BEM, dynamic stall and stochastic models' results in terms of their increment probability density functions gives consistent results.