Chapter 4 Development of a Pro/MECHANICA model of a passive variable-pitch turbine

4.1 Introduction
Preliminary investigation of passive variable-pitch turbine performance and dynamics was conducted using the commercial motion simulation software package Pro/MECHANICA, produced by Parametric Technology Corporation - website http://www.ptc.com. The package is used within the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at UNSW in the Pro/ENGINEER integrated mode. Pro/MECHANICA is able to simulate the motion of the turbine rotor and blades over time as a multi-degree-of-freedom mechanism under the inuence of prescribed loads. It was used to investigate the general performance of the pendulum type inertial design and to gain insight into the dynamics of this type of turbine.

4.2 Pro/MECHANICA Model

Parts are created and assembled in Pro/ENGINEER, then converted to a mechanism with the desired degrees of freedom within Pro/MECHANICA. The model created in Pro/ENGINEER and used in Pro/MECHANICA is shown in Figure 4.1. It was designed to represent the essential features of the turbine and the manner in which they are connected. 80

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Figure 4.1: Pro/MECHANICA model of the pendulum type inertial turbine

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In the initial version of the model, the rotor body was connected to the base via a pin joint, giving it one rotational degree of freedom. The base is xed as ground. Each of the three blades is connected to the rotor by a pin joint, making the mechanism planar. Each blade consists of two discs whose diameter and thickness can be adjusted to achieve any combination of mass and polar moment of inertia. The aerofoilshaped features are massless surfaces and are purely cosmetic. One disc represents the mass of an unbalanced blade, centred at the aerodynamic centre of the aerofoil prole. As before, the distance between the aerodynamic centre and the pin joint axis is termed Rac . The position of the other disc is adjusted so that the combined centre of mass lies on a line perpendicular to the blade chord line passing through the pivot axis. The oset of the centre of mass from the pivot axis is labelled Rcg . This arrangement causes the blade to seek a zero pitch angle under the action of centrifugal force. This double disc model was designed to reect the fact that blade mass and polar moment of inertia are constrained by structural design considerations, and so the parameters Rac and Rcg cannot be adjusted independently. Later the model was given two additional degrees of freedom of horizontal translation of the rotor hub. This freedom was designed to represent the exibility of the turbine tower, so that the potential signicance of this motion on the blade pitch response may be investigated. 4.2.1 Aerodynamic load simulation While Pro/MECHANICA is well suited to investigation of the dynamics of the turbine mechanism, it is not designed to simulate aerodynamic loads. The aerodynamic forces experienced by each of the blades were approximated using a

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combination of the standard loads available in Pro/MECHANICA based on twodimensional blade element theory. Pro/MECHANICA allows the user to create a set of measures, which are either kinematic variables such as joint axis positions or velocities, or are values calculated from these via user-entered expressions. The values of measures are computed at each time step and can be used to control the magnitudes of loads applied to the mechanism. For this analysis, measures were created to compute the magnitude and direction of the apparent wind on each blade at each time step, based on the blades own velocity and the free wind velocity. The angle of attack, which takes into account the blades instantaneous pitch angle, is then used to nd the value of measures for lift, drag and pitching moment coecients from a lookup table of values published for the NACA 0018 prole (Lazauskas, 2002). Further measures are computed for the magnitude of lift and drag forces on each blade, based on the relative wind speed. It is not possible to adjust the direction of a force in Pro/MECHANICA during a run. Therefore the variable direction of the lift and drag forces on each blade was simulated using a set of four xed force components. These forces are xed in direction relative to the World Coordinate System (ground) and together can simulate any direction and magnitude of resultant force. They are applied to the aerodynamic centre of each blade, assumed to be xed at the quarter chord. The key measures dened for each blade are shown in Table 4.1. In this simplied analysis no account is taken of any reduction in wind velocity due to the force transmitted to the ow by the blades (so no energy is extracted from the air), nor for the eects of dynamic stall, ow curvature, nite

CHAPTER 4. DEVELOPMENT OF A PRO/MECHANICA MODEL Measure U theta azimuth pivot blade.theta0 Denition Free wind velocity Set manually prior to run Rotor azimuth angle. = Joint Axis Measure Theta normalised to 0 to 2. = mod(theta + blade.theta0, 2) Blade pitch angle. = Joint Axis Measure Azimuth angle oset from the reference blade for this blade. Set manually Speed of the blade. = if(omega<1e-5, 0, omega x radius) X component of the relative wind at the blade. = -V cos(azimuth) Y component of the relative wind at the blade. = V sin(azimuth) - U Magnitude of relative wind. = sqrt(Wx2 + Wy2 ) Angle of attack on zero pitch blade. = if(W <1e-5, 0, if(V <1e-5, -/2 azimuth, if(mod(azimuth, ) == /2, if(V < U && mod(azimuth, 2) == /2, -, 0), if(cos(azimuth)< 0, acos((W 2 + V 2 U 2 )/(2W V )), -acos((W 2 + V 2 U 2 )/(2W V ))))) Actual angle of attack. = zp.alpha - pivot alpha normalised to 0 to 360 . = (alpha - 2 oor(alpha/(2)) x 180/ Lift coecient. = Look-up table, input AoA Drag coecient. = Look-up table, input AoA Drag force due to Wx = 0.5 rho chord span Wx W Cd Lift force due to Wx = 0.5 rho chord span Wx W Cl Drag force due to Wy = 0.5 rho chord span Wy W Cd Lift force due to Wy = 0.5 rho chord span Wy W Cl

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V Wx Wy W zp.alpha

alpha AoA Cl Cd Dx Lx Dy Ly

Table 4.1: Key Pro/MECHANICA measures. Relevant measures are duplicated for each blade.

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aspect ratio, wind shear or parasitic drag. These simplications were considered justiable because the aim of the exercise was to investigate the dynamics of the turbine rather than assess its eciency. The assumption of constant wind velocity is signicant not so much because of the consequent overestimation of average output torque (this could be corrected), but because of the variation in wind velocity both across the width of the turbine and between upwind and downwind passes that is neglected. This variation signicantly eects the pitch cycle when the turbine is heavily loaded and the wind is greatly decelerated. Therefore the Pro/MECHANICA simulations were conned to low tip speed ratios and correspondingly small loads, where deceleration of the ow is minimal. The turbine speed was chosen to give a relatively low tip speed ratio of 1.3 at a wind speed of 6 m/s. This speed is also in the operating region of interest for a study of self-starting ability.

4.3 Summary
A simplied model of a pendulum type inertial passive variable-pitch turbine was created in Pro/MECHANICA. The model may be used to study the dynamics of this type of turbine under the inuence of simplied aerodynamic loads. As no account of ow deceleration is made, the model is not useful for predicting the operating output of the turbine, except at very low speeds. This model was used to conduct initial investigations of the relationships between key design parameters and blade pitch response. Results of its use are presented in Chapter 7.