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The blade is made out of an orthotropic composite material, it has a varying thickness and it also has a spar inside the blade for structural rigidity. These specs, which are important for the FEA simulation, are described in more detail in Part 2 of the tutorial.

The turbulent wind is flows towards the negative z-direction (into the page on the above diagram) at 12 m/s which is a typical rated wind speed for a turbine this size. This incoming flow is assumed to make the blade rotate at an angular velocity of -2.22 rad/s about the z-axis (the blade is thus spinning clockwise when looking at it from the front, like most real wind turbines). The tip speed ratio (the ratio of the blade tip velocity to the incoming wind velocity) is therefore equal to 8 which is a reasonable value for a large wind turbine. Note that to represent the blade being connected to a hub, the blade root is offset from the axis of rotation by 1 meter. The hub is not included in our model.

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Part 1

In this section of the tutorial, the blade geometry is imported, a mesh is created around the blade and the Fluent solver is then used to find the aerodynamics loading on the blade, the fluid streamlines and the torque generated. We will use air at standard conditions (15 degree celcius). Its density is 1.225 kg/m^3 and its viscosity is 1.7894e-05 kg/m*s.

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