Investigations on bifurcation behavior of wind turbine airfoil response at a high angle of attack

Abstract

Design load and vibration for parked conditions are gaining in importance for large-scale modern wind turbines with increasing flexibility, especially edgewise vibration when the blade is at a high angle of attack. In this work, flow-induced vibration of the wind turbine airfoil at 90 degrees of attack angle is studied with the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulation. The unsteady aerodynamic force due to flow separation and vortex shedding at the high angle of attack causes the chordwise vibration of the airfoil. When the vortex shedding frequency $f_v$ gets close to the chordwise natural frequency $f_n$ of the airfoil, vortex-induced vibration (VIV) of high amplitude occurs accompanied with the frequency lock-in phenomenon. In the post lock-in regime, it is found that period-3 and torus bifurcation occur successively and the vibration response becomes aperiodic. Dynamic mode decomposition(DMD) technique is used to investigate the mechanism of bifurcation from the perspective of energy balance, through analyzing the vorticity field in the wake and pressure distribution on the airfoil surface. For the certain incoming velocity in the post lock-in regime, since the frequency of the DMD mode $f=2f_v/3$ is close to the natural frequency$f_n$, both the vibration of frequency $2f_v/3$ and $f_v$ get excited, leading to the onset of bifurcation. The Lissajou curves are obtained through reconstructing the transient pressure of each DMD mode, which indicates that energy transfer mainly exists in modes $f=f_v$. In addition, the reconstructed Lissajou curves based on the leading DMD modes agree well with the original time-domain Lissajou curves.