Objectives

 

The overall objective is to utilize high performance computing (HPC) to improve the understanding of wind turbine related physical phenomena. This is a necessity in order to optimize the design of future large-scale rotor blades according to technical, economic and societal demands.

Targeted impacts in brief

  1. Advancements in the current capacity and performance of wind turbines
  2. Creation of technology to allow for the acceleration of development, testing and ultimately implementation of newer, larger turbines
  3. Consideration of public and stakeholder feedback in the next generations of wind turbine designs

The UPWARDS project will establish a high fidelity multi-physics, mechatronic and multi-scale simulation framework for wind turbines that enables integrated modelling of wind flow, mechanical movements, structural/control dynamics and stresses with a level of detail that today only is achievable in a piecemeal fashion meaning a comprehensive holistic vision is not possible.

UPWARDS will define a large-scale virtual prototype of a horizontal axis wind turbine including description of various design aspects and the turbine’s mechanical and control system. The purpose of the virtual prototype is to serve as a study case to ensure that the developed simulation tools performs as required, and enable generation of realistic and relevant simulation result for knowledge extraction and further exploitation.

Using the innovative resources that will be developed as well as feedback from the public and stakeholder opinions and needs that will be gathered, the UPWARDS project will perform high fidelity simulations of important wind turbine related phenomena to exploit and increase the understanding of their physical behaviour and interaction. State of the art data mining methods will be used to extract and structure relevant information from the data that will inform new wind turbine designs.