Decoupled aerodynamic and structural design of wind turbine adaptive blades

This paper presents a method for decoupled design of bend-twist adaptive blades (BTABs) in which the aerodynamic and structural designs take place separately. In this approach the induced twist is considered as an aerodynamic design parameter, whilst its dependency on the structural characteristics of the blade is taken into account by imposing a proper constraint on the structure design. The main advantage of this method is the significant reduction in evaluation time by replacing a finite element analysis (FEA)-based coupled-aero-structure (CAS) simulation in the aerodynamic objective evaluation by a non-FEA-based CAS simulation. Through a re-design case study an ordinary blade has been converted to a BTAB and the efficiency of the method in performing decoupled design of BTABs has been illustrated.