Evaluating Multi-Fidelity Structural Models for Utility-Scale Wind Turbine Blades

Abstract This paper focuses on evaluating multi-fidelity structural models to analyze a realistic structural design of an utility-scale wind turbine blade. These models include the beam theory and its corresponding finite element (FE) method, the shell theory and its corresponding FE method, and the three-dimensional solid FE method. The shell model is constructed with Ansys Parametric Design Language (APDL). The beam model is built using the Beam Cross-Section Analysis Software (BECAS) and ANSYS beam element. Different from conventional cross-sectional FE model generation method, in this paper, the inputs for creating BECAS cross-sectional meshes will be directly generated from the shell FE model. Then using the FE model data from both of the shell and beam models, the author built a full solid FE model. Because of the aforementioned approach, the three models (beam, shell, and solid) are inter-consistent to each other. To benchmark the fidelity of these models, computational aspects and simulation results are compared across the modeling methods mentioned above. From the comparison, it can bee seen both beam and shell models predict reasonable mass, center of gravity, natural frequencies, and deflections that close to the solid model. However, dependencies are found when the local materials strains from beam and shell models are compared to those from the solid model.