The exploration of key aerodynamic parameters for an integrated design of wind turbine blades

When selecting the structural parameters in an integrated structure and control design for wind turbines, the existing approaches were mainly depend on designers´ experience, resulting in a certain arbitrariness. The root cause was negligence of mechanism analysis to the coupling relationship between structure and control of wind turbines. Indeed, compared with those insensitive parameters, small changes in key parameters could often significantly improve the control performance. Accordingly, this paper proposed a simple and practical method of looking for key structural parameters as design variables, hoping to minimize the sacrifice of structural performance of wind turbines as well as achieving great improvement in control performance. Finally, specific to the aerodynamic parameters of wind turbine blades, by traversing the chord length and twist angle and comparing similar airfoils to find out the key parameters. The simulation results showed that airfoil was the key parameter, with its reasonable shape fine-tuning could significantly enhanced the performance of MPPT control of wind turbines.