Wild on WindThe tricky thing about wind energy is that you never know literally when or how hard the wind will blow. And when you are designing a new multi-megawatt wind turbine that needs withstand extreme and highly variable wind loads while maintaining high productivity and hopefully 100% reliability for twenty years or more, well, testing all possible load scenarios is practically speaking impossible.
Like every other industry today, wind turbine manufacturers depend on the latest simulation methods to optimize their design – not to mention chopping a significant chunk of design time out
of the process. And unlike other industries, wind turbine developers face some very particular challenges like aero-elastic wind load modeling, automating numerous and varying load runs and comprehensive pre- and postprocessing. Previously, users had to rely on specialized third party software outside the LMS Virtual.Lab environment and the related time-consuming data translations and importation, but thanks to a new feature in LMS Virtual.Lab Rev 8B -- LMS Virtual.Lab Motion Aerodyn Wind Loads, users will be able to reliably predict transient dynamic loads and use them as input for subsequent fatigue-life and radiated noise emission calculations – all from within the LMS Virtual.Lab environment.
How to reliably predict something as abstract as wind?
An ideal environment for 3D studies with control system functionality, LMS Virtual.Lab Motion can easily be used to create the blade and its structural flexibility and the wind behavioral traits, incorporating the modeling of any other critical elements in appropriate detail, such as gearboxes, bearings and controls. The wind loads themselves are computed using the Aerodyn subroutine for LMS Virtual. Lab Motion. Numerous pre-processing options are available to help create correctly formatted wind input data and include wind behavior traits ranging from turbulent to constant and even IEC wind standards to validate the wind turbine design. Based on this wind information and the blade orientation and speed during each time step, the LMS Virtual.Lab Aerodyn subroutine takes over, calculating the apparent wind speed on the blades and the precise subsequent wind load for each blade section enabling accurate dynamic simulation studies in LMS Virtual.Lab Motion.
“We integrated the Aerodyn functionality used to apply accurate loads on a turbine into our advanced 3D multi-body code to model the entire wind turbine interaction with the wind in a much more scalable way. An easily accessible 3D environment for cross-attribute multi-disciplinary simulations, LMS Virtual.Lab is the only 3D CAE environment that addresses the specific challenges of wind turbine design including precise blade-wind interaction and load cascading thanks to the new Aerodyn Wind Loads feature,” concluded Guillaume Lethé, Junior Product Manager, LMS Virtual.Lab Motion.
