Variable Blade Inertia in State-of-the-Art Wind Turbine Structural-Dynamics Models.

This paper presents a comparison of two methods to represent variable blade inertia in two codes for aero-servo-elastic simulations of wind turbines: the nonlinear aeroelastic multi-body model HAWC2 and the nonlinear geometrically exact beam model BeamDyn for OpenFAST. The main goal is to enable these tools to simulate the dynamic behavior of a wind turbine with variable blade inertia. However, current state-of-the-art load simulation tools for wind turbines cannot simulate variable blade inertia, so the source code of these tools must be modified. The validity of the modified codes is proven based on a simple beam model. The validation shows very good agreement between the modified codes of HAWC2, BeamDyn and an analytical calculation. The add-on of variable blade inertias is applied to reduce the mechanical loads of a 5-megawatt reference wind turbine with an integrated hydraulic-pneumatic flywheel in its rotor blades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]