José Pedro Albergaria Amaral Blasques

Aero-Elastic Optimization of a 10 MW Wind Turbine

This article presents the multi-disciplinary wind turbine analysis and optimization tool HawtOpt2 that is based on the open-source framework OpenMDAO, and interfaces to several state-of-the art simulation codes, which allows for a wide variety of problem formulations and combinations of models. In this article simultaneous aerodynamic and structural optimization of a 10 MW wind turbine rotor is carried out with respect to material distribution and outer shape. A set of optimal designs with respect to mass and AEP are presented, which shows that an AEP biased design can increase AEP with 1.5% while a mass biased design can achieve mass savings of up to 20% compared to the baseline DTU 10MW RWT. A newly developed frequency-domain based fatigue model is used to minimise fatigue damage, which achieves up to 8% reduction in the tower bottom fore-aft fatigue damage, with only limited reductions of the aerodynamic performance or increased mass.

Design of an Aeroelastically Tailored 10 MW Wind Turbine Rotor

This work presents an integrated multidisciplinary wind turbine optimization framework utilizing state-of-the-art aeroelastic and strutural tools, capable of simultaneous design of the outer geometry and internal structure of the blade. The framework is utilized to design a 10 MW rotor constrained not to exceed the design loads of an existing reference wind turbine. The results show that through combined geometric tailoring of the internal structure and aerodynamic shape of the blade it is possible to achieve significant passive load alleviation that allows for a 9% longer blade with an increase in AEP of 8.7%, without increasing blade mass and without significant increases in ultimate and fatigue loads on the hub and tower.

Multi-fidelity optimization of horizontal axis wind turbines

Multi-fidelity optimization of horizontal axis wind turbines This paper is concerned with the numerical design optimization of wind turbines. Many examples of wind turbine design optimization in literature rely on simplified analysis in some form. This may lead to sub-optimal design, because the optimizer does not see the full fidelity of the problem. To overcome these challenges, this research will explore the multifidelity Approximation and Model Management Framework (AMMF) optimization algorithm. AMMF is similar to conventional gradient based optimization, except in the search phase of the optimization, the analysis is replaced with a fast low-fidelity model that has been corrected to give C1 consistency with the high-fidelity model. AMMF was first explored with a simple preliminary investigation based on analytic equations. Second, it was applied to a single-discipline design optimization problem to find the internal structure with the least weight. Finally, AMMF was used in full aero-elastic wind turbine rotor design optimization problem based on the DTU 10 MW reference wind turbine design. Mixed results were achieved for the final study and further work is needed to find the best configuration for AMMF.