Aeroelastic Stability of Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine Blades

Multi-Megawatt wind turbines have long, slender and heavy blades that can undergo extremely wind loadings. Aeroelastic stability of wind turbine blades is of great importance in both power production and load carrying capacity of structure. This paper investigates the aeroelastic stability of wind turbine blades modeled as thin walled composite box beam, utilizing unsteady incompressible aerodynamics. The structural model incorporates a number of non-classical effects such as transverse shear, warping inhibition, non-uniform torsional model and rotary inertia. The unsteady incompressible aerodynamics based on Wagner’s function is used to determine the aerodynamic loads. Governing differential equations of motion are obtained using Hamilton’s principle and solved using extended Galerkin’s method. The results obtained in this paper, related to clarification of the effects of pretwist, presetting and bending-torsion elastic coupling on the aeroelastic instability boundaries of the thin-walled composite beams. The obtained results are expected to be useful toward obtaining better predictions of the aeroelastic behavior of composite rotating blades.