Developing the Actuator Disk Model to Predict the Fluid–Structure Interaction in Numerical Simulation of Multimegawatt Wind Turbine Blades

Abstract

Abstract The fluid–structure interaction (FSI) is generally addressed in multimegawatt wind turbine calculations. From the fluid flow perspective, the semi-analytical approaches, like actuator disk (AD) model, were commonly used in wind turbine rotor calculations. Indeed, the AD model can effectively reduce the computational cost of full-scale numerical methods. Additionally, it can substantially improve the results of pure analytical methods. Despite its great advantages, the AD model has not been developed to simulate the FSI problem in wind turbine simulations. This study first examines the effect of constant (rigid) cone angle on the performance of the chosen benchmark wind turbine. As a major contribution, this work subsequently extends the rigid AD model to nonrigid applications to suitably simulate the FSI. The new developed AD-FSI solver uses the finite-volume method to calculate the aerodynamic loads and the beam theory to predict the structural behaviors. A benchmark megawatt wind turbine is simulated to examine the accuracy of the newly developed AD-FSI solver. Next, the results of this solver are compared with the results of other researchers, who applied various analytical and numerical methods to obtain their results. The comparisons indicate that the new developed solver calculates the aerodynamic loads reliably and predicts the blade deflection very accurately.