Development of the QFEM Solver : The Development of Modal Analysis Code for Wind Turbine Blades in QBLADE

The Wind Turbine industry continues to drive towards high market penetrationand profitability. In order to keep Wind Turbines in field for as long as possiblecomputational analysis tools are required. The open source tool QBlade[38] softwarewas extended to now contain routines to analyse the structural properties of WindTurbine blades. This was achieved using 2D integration methods and a Tapered Euler-Bernoulli beam element in order to find the mode shapes and 2D sectional properties.This was a key step towards integrating the National Renewable Energy LaboratoriesFAST package[32] which has the ability to analyse Aeroelastic Responses. The QFEMmodule performed well for the test cases including: hollow isotropic blade, rotatingbeam and tapered beam. Some improvements can be made to the torsion estimationof the 2D sections but this has no effect on the mode shapes required for the FASTsimulations.