Aerodynamic design of wind turbine blade with second derivative of thickness distribution as constraint

Abstract

Abstract In order to make more use of wind energy, large-scale wind turbine blade size is the trend of development. With the increasing of blade length, the design and manufacture of the structure with the requirements of safety and economy are faced with great challenges. It is most sensitive to the blade manufacturer to reduce the composite lamination and production cost as long as the stress and strain level of the structure is satisfied. Therefore, the ideal thickness distribution requires not only the thickness monotonically decrease along the radial direction, but also the concavity and convexity of the thickness distribution function are required to be constant. Based on the in-house design code SurroOpt and the momentum-blade theory method, an optimization design platform for wind turbine blades was established. A 400kW wind turbine blade design was carried out with the aim of maximizing the output power and the constraint of the second derivative of the thickness distribution. The results show that the concave-convex characteristic of thickness distribution function has not changed, which is beneficial to the structural design. The designed blades have been manufactured and installed for operation. For the whole device, the maximum coefficient of wind energy utilization (including the loss of motor and machinery) reaches 0.42, which is 2.4% higher than 0.41 of the same kind of products.