What is Vortex Wake aerodynamics?
Traditional aerodynamic models rely on simplifications that, while effective, may not fully capture the complex aerodynamic effects in modern wind turbines. Vortex Wake methods provide a more physics-based representation of wake dynamics, offering a higher-fidelity approach to modelling turbine aerodynamics. This advancement enables engineers to better predict turbine performance, improve load calculations, and optimise turbine designs for real-world conditions as well as reducing uncertainty.
Key advantages:
The introduction of Vortex Wake aerodynamics in Bladed brings multiple benefits to wind turbine engineers and developers:
- Greater Accuracy – More precise modeling of wake effects compared to BEM-modelling
- Future-Proofing – As turbines grow in size and complexity, advanced aerodynamic modeling becomes increasingly essential. The lifting line free vortex wake method in Bladed enables turbine designers to remove conservative assumptions when designing large flexible wind turbines.
- Does not require engineering momentum correction models - Instead the vortex wake method resolves the induction calculation directly and is a more theoretically accurate method.
- Enhanced load calculations – Better understanding of unsteady aerodynamic forces leads to more reliable structural designs.
- Enhanced calculation accuracy at reasonable computational cost - The new calculation in Bladed has been parallelised with CPU (Central processing units) and GPU (Graphical Processing Unit), allowing users to choose different levels of computational efficiency.
To learn more about this new feature, visit our Vortex Wake Aerodynamics documentation or contact us for a demo.
