An Aero-Elastic Study of a Utility Scale Wind Turbine Blade

Abstract

This work aims to optimize the aerodynamic and structural design of the 5MWNRELwind turbine and a site specific derivative minimizing the levelized cost of energy,LCOE, generated from these two wind turbine designs. The first step was the design of a site specific wind turbine. This design was achieved by replacing the primary and tip sections’ airfoil profiles with NRELS-family airfoils for its low sensitivity to surface contamination. The second step was optimization of these two wind turbine designs to Zaafarana site wind conditions. This optimization was carried out using a genetic algorithm developedinMATLAB coupled with FASTmodularization framework. This approach resulted in decreasing the LCOE of the baseline 5MW NREL wind turbine by 2.7% due to using airfoilwith low-sensitivity to dust contaminationand the optimization of the designs to site-specific wind conditions.

Keywords:wind turbine, optimization, levelized cost of energy, genetic algorithm, surface contamination, site-specific design.