Aeroelastic Analysis of a Morphing Wing for Airborne Wind Energy Applications

Abstract: The aim of this thesis is to set up a high-fidelity fluid structure interaction (FSI) simulation environment to study the gust load alleviation capability of camber-morphing airborne wind energy (AWE) wings. The simulation environment will enable studying the transient flow phenomena around the wing when encountering wind gusts and gives the possibility of investigating dynamic instabilities. To meet this end, an investigation on gust wind simulations is conducted. The Forcing Momentum Source method is considered the most suitable approach to simulate a discrete gust and is implemented. It allows simulating a gust of any given shape, duration and magnitude. In order to set up the fluid environment for the FSI simulation an automatic mesh generation is created using the software ICEM CFD. This generates a high quality hexahedral mesh for an arbitrary AWE wing with minimum user input. Furthermore, FSI simulations of a morphing AWE wing interacting with gust winds are carried out and different load alleviation strategies are investigated. The AWE wing investigated in this thesis did not show any instabilities at a freestream velocity of 100 m/s. Furthermore, the wing has the ability to alleviate loads induced by a sinusoidal shaped gust wind with a magnitude of 5 m/s and a duration of 0.5 seconds. The work of this thesis concludes that a high-fidelity FSI environment has been successfully set up. Within the environment potential load alleviation via morphing, gust interaction and dynamic instabilities can be investigated for a morphing AWE wing.