Dynamic characteristics and enhanced performance of a novel wind turbine rotor analyzed via experiments and numerical simulation

The enormous demand for large wind turbine rotors has led to a need to develop high‐performance and reliable wind turbine rotors. The flexibility of the huge blade was a challenge in creating a balanced design with regard to dynamic behavior, mass, and power output. To enhance the wind turbine rotor, a newly designed wind turbine system with a supporting rod and damper was proposed and investigated. A scaled blade was experimentally tested, with the results indicating an increase in both frequency and damping of the system. Through the use of a self‐coded numerical model, the correlations between the design constraints and the dynamic behavior, tip displacement, and additional mass of the rotor were demonstrated. This showed that the novel rotor has some preferable characteristics in both static and dynamic aspects. In particular, this blade is stiffer and has a smaller tip displacement compared with a traditional cantilevered blade. These characteristics enabled the effective application of the novel rotor to a 5‐MW wind turbine to achieve a 15.16% power output increase based on the blade element momentum theory with Prandtl correction, as well as 5.1% mass savings. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.