Numerical studies in vibration analysis of a wind turbine

grabcad

As we all know that our conventional source of energy are non-renewable and their rates are increasing. So there is a need to make full use of renewable energy technologies to harness the untapped potential in cost effective manner and fulfill the energy demand such as wind energy. Wind turbine is a system for extracting energy from wind but it has a very complex structure and size. It is important to analyze the wind turbine for its dynamic behavior before its manufacturing. It is difficult and impractical to test a full scale wind turbine for finding out its dynamic behavior. This should be done at the design stage itself. Therefore, this work attempts numerical studies in modelling and dynamic analysis of full scale wind turbine for finding out its dynamic characteristics and behavior. Modal analysis is a tool to predict the natural frequencies, damping factors and mode shapes of any structure, whereas harmonic analysis is used to predict the dynamic response of any structure under harmonic excitation. This work attempts both modal and harmonic analysis of a wind turbine using three dimensional elements. The work uses finite element method for the numerical analysis as is available in ANSYS workbench software. For this, initially the analysis has been carried out for a single blade and then the results are also presented for a full scale wind turbine.