PARAMETRIC GEOMETRY GENERATION OF WIND TURBINES

Resumo

Wind energy is an alternative of interest to other energy forms, since it is renewable and can reduce the
environment damage as compared to other more pollute forms of generation. Thus, understanding wind turbines
and how they operate is a key to increase efficiency and production. For numerical analysis of wind turbines, the
geometry must be adequately defined, which is a complicated task due to the shape of their blade profiles. Thus,
this article proposes a way to create parametric wind turbines geometries using the software Grasshopper, a plugin
from Rhinoceros 3D. Grasshopper is a visual programming language, allowing to produce parametric geometries
as function of different input parameters. In this work, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) geometries
are modelled, which are the horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) references proposed in the project known as
Wind Partnership for Advanced component Technologies (WindPACT). As wind turbines have generally the same
shape and their dimensions are proportional to each other, the intention of parametrizing the process is to facilitate
the geometry creation when some parameters change, avoiding remodeling the entire turbine if it were produced
in a usual CAD software. This paper shows how to model and obtain the final geometry, which is readily readable
by any simulation software, such as Ansys. All the benefits and problems encountered are commented and the
results are shown.