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L07 - IEA 3.4MW RWT

Introduction

This example considers the IEA 3.4 MW reference wind turbine and recreates the model in Flexcom. Although this turbine is relatively small by modern standards, it is a useful in the context of prototype floating offshore turbines. Full details of the turbine are provided in the official definition document (Bortolotti et al., 2019) while some of the main aspects are briefly summarised here.

The results section presents a brief summary of a code-to-code comparison of simulation models built using OpenFAST and Flexcom. As the study is focused on the aeroelastic response, the turbine is fixed at its base, and no hydrodynamic effects are considered.  

Turbine

The original design work aimed at developing a class 3A land-based wind turbine model with a rated electrical power of 3.37 MW, a rated aerodynamic power of 3.6 MW, a rotor diameter of 130 m and a hub height of 110 m. These values were selected by the project partners with the expectation that they may establish as standards within the land-based wind energy market. The optimization was run for minimum COE, estimated by a cost model developed at NREL.

The IEA 3.4 MW RWT data is open source and is available on the IEA Wind Systems GitHub site IEA Wind Systems GitHub. Aero-servo-elastic input files to model the turbine in various modelling tools are also available in the repository.

The main properties of the IEA 3.4 MW reference wind turbine are as follows:

Results

Results may be examined the following sections.

•Steady Wind