Some modelling improvements for prediction of wind turbine rotor loads in turbulent wind

This paper investigates the accuracy of three aerodynamic models to compute loads on wind turbine rotors under turbulent inflow: Blade Element Momentum (BEM), Unsteady Vortex Lattice Method (UVLM), and Large Eddy Simulation with Actuator Line (LES‐AL). Turbulent inflow conditions are numerically generated with a new approach that combines control of turbulence and realistic velocity spectrum by using Mann boxes and LES simulations, respectively. Several deficiencies of the tested models are found and overcome through proposed improvements. First, the BEM assumption of independent radial sections does not hold in turbulent cases with long blades. Thus, a spatial filter to account for the interaction of radial sections in BEM is designed through the analysis of these interactions with UVLM. Second, the absence of viscous drag in UVLM is observed to lead to a very high rotor power coefficient, and it is shown that this can be mitigated by including drag in UVLM with a BEM‐like‐approach through look‐up tables. Third, the free wake model in UVLM, required to accurately capture rotor thrust, significantly increases computational cost. For this reason, a new wake discretisation scheme for the wake convection equation in UVLM is proposed, in which a coarse discretisation is employed far from the solid surfaces, which significantly reduces the computational time. Finally, these improvements and the performance of the three fidelities are analysed in a reference 10 MW wind turbine rotor demonstrating, in general, good agreement.