Wind turbine blade vibration at standstill conditions—the effect of imposing lag on the aerodynamic response of an elastically mounted airfoil

The present study investigated physical phenomena related to stall‐induced vibrations potentially existing on wind turbine blades at standstill conditions. The study considered two‐dimensional airfoil sections while it omitted three‐dimensional effects. In the study, a new engineering‐type computational model for the aeroelastic response of an elastically mounted airfoil was used to investigate the influence of temporal lag in the aerodynamic response on the aeroelastic stability in deep stall. The study indicated that even a relatively low lag significantly increases the damping of the model. A comparison between the results from a model with lag imposed on all force components with the results from a model with lag imposed exclusively on the lift showed only marginal difference between the damping in the two cases. A parameter study involving positions of the elastic hinge point and the center of gravity indicated that the stability is relatively independent of these parameters. Another parameter study involving spring constants showed that the stability of each mode is dependent only on the spring constant acting in the direction of the leading motion of the mode. An investigation of the influence of the added mass terms showed that only the pitch‐rate and flapwise‐acceleration terms have any influence on the stability. An investigation of three different profiles showed that the stability is heavily dependent on the aerodynamic characteristics of the profiles—mainly on the lift. It was also shown that only the edgewise mode is unstable in deep stall. Moreover, independent of the amount of temporal lag in the aerodynamic response of the model, the inflow‐angle region in the vicinity of 180° remains unstable in the edgewise mode. Therefore, this inflow‐angle region may create stability problems in real life. The other type of vibrations potentially present at standstill conditions is vortex‐induced, being outside the scope of the present study. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.