Wind Turbine Aerodynamics

Our group is also working on several projects related to wind turbine blade design and optimization. The wind turbine design and analysis code XTurb-PSU is being actively developed in our group and used primarily for research and class projects in a graduate course on “Wind Turbine Aerodynamics”.

Active developments include a novel stall-delay model and a blade optimization methodology that couples the XTurb-PSU code with an evolutionary strategy based on Covariance Matrix Adaptation (CMA-ES). As opposed to other common genetic algorithms that require tuning of various parameters, the only free parameter in CMA-ES/XTurb-PSU is the population size. We have successfully demonstrated the capability of XTurb-PSU/CMA-ES by designing wind turbine blades under a variety of constraints, e.g. maximum Annual Energy Production (AEP) and minimum root flap bending moment. Further developments and applications are underway.