Structural Analysis of Rotating Wind Turbines with Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

Nowadays, alternative energy plays an increasing role in human daily life. Wind is one of the most popular energy sources and continues to grow in industry. For this reason, the study of wind turbine structure is interesting. This research analyzes the wind forces applied to a 5 MW turbine, which widely used in the electric power industry. For wind analysis, the condition that the wind turbine can generate maximum electricity at wind speed 11.4 m/s was applied at the same time with rotating turbine at a speed of 12 rpm. There are two parts in this research. Firstly, the simulation and model calibration, a model with concurrent rotating turbine blades was used, which would be behaviorally more accurate, to determine the aerodynamic wind forces acting on the structure evaluated using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The results obtained from the analysis were found close to previous studies. Next, the obtained results of wind forces were applied to the structure of turbine tower based on a simple structural model to study effect of steel thickness to structural responses under AISC 360-10 provision. It was found that the turbine tower was strong enough under such wind conditions.