Numerical simulations of a large offshore wind turbine exposed to turbulent inflow conditions

Abstract

This work is intended to investigate the aerodynamic responses of a large generic 10-MW offshore wind turbine under turbulent inflow conditions. The nonlinear lifting line free vortex wake simulations approach is employed for this purpose, computed using the QBlade code. In these studies, the effects of a three-dimensional correction model for the airfoil polars were studied in advance. For this purpose, the blade element momentum computations employing the corrected polars are performed and compared to computational fluid dynamics simulations, and a good agreement is obtained between both employed approaches. Background turbulence is then imposed in the QLLT simulations with the turbulence intensities ranging from low to high turbulence levels (3%–15%). Furthermore, the impact of wind shear from different locations (offshore and onshore) is investigated in this work.