Review of aeroelasticity for wind turbine: Current status, research focus and future perspectives

Aeroelasticity has become a critical issue for Multi-Megawatt wind turbine due to the longer and more flexible blade. In this paper, the development of aeroelasticity and aeroelastic codes for wind turbine is reviewed and the aeroelastic models for wind turbine blade are described, based on which, the current research focuses for large scale wind turbine are discussed, including instability problems for onshore and offshore wind turbines, effects of complex inflow, nonlinear effects of large blade deflection, smart structure technologies, and aerohydroelasticity. Finally, the future development of aeroelastic code for large scale wind turbine: aeroservoelasticity and smart rotor control; nonlinear aeroelasticity due to large blade deflection; full-scale 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solution for dynamics; and aerohydroelasticity are presented.