Case Study: Sandia National Laboratories achieves validated high-fidelity aeroelastic CFD analysis of its 100m wind-turbine blade with Altair (AcuSolve)

Aeroelastic Investigation of the Sandia 100m Blade Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Sandia National Laboratories needed a high‑fidelity assessment of the aeroelastic behavior of its 13.2 MW Sandia 100m blade to inform design decisions for larger rotors and reduce lifecycle costs. Altair supported this effort using its CFD and simulation toolchain, notably the AcuSolve flow solver (with OptiStruct modal input and AcuMeshSim meshing), to perform fully coupled fluid‑structure interaction (FSI) analyses and benchmark against conventional tools like FAST and WT_Perf.

Altair implemented a modal superposition P‑FSI approach in AcuSolve, mapping 100 eigenvalues from OptiStruct and using structured surface and boundary‑layer meshing to model a 120° rotor sector of the 100m blade. The AcuSolve results showed power predictions in excellent agreement with FAST and WT_Perf up to 11.3 m/s, matched WT_Perf on rotor thrust and flapwise bending (while FAST overpredicted those loads and tip deflections), and demonstrated no flutter in stability tests at 1.0–1.3× rated speed—validating Altair’s CFD‑based FSI workflow for aeroelastic design and stability assessment.

Sandia National Laboratories