Large-scale Wind Turbine Blade And Airfoil Optimization Design

Optimization design platforms for wind turbine blade and airfoil are built based on theoptimization design software Isight. The blade aerodynamic performance calculation, blade design loadevaluation, blade structural design, system cost evaluation and wind farm operation model forvariable-pitch wind turbines are investigated and then integrated in this paper. As a result, the analysismethod for the cost of energy (COE) is derived, and a new target of wind farm profit (WFP) for windturbine blade design is developed, The difference between the COE and WFP is analyzed, showing thatblade design with the target of maximum wind farm profit is more reasonable than that with COE.The blade gross performance is directly set as design objective for airfoil optimization in the partof airfoil design. A four-airfoil family for pitch-regulated wind turbines is designed, and subsequently ahigh aerodynamic performance blade is designed based on the new airfoils. Then the performance ofblunt trailing edge airfoils is analyzed, and the result shows that blades with blunt trailing edge have noobvious advantage in the aerodynamic performance.At last, a concept of airfoil-blade joint design is proposed. The blade design and airfoil design areintegrated in order to get a platform which can give the aerodynamic layout of blade and basic airfoils atthe same time. Additionally, airfoils designed by the joint design platform bring new inspirations for thecurrently airfoil design work.