Case Study: National Renewable Energy Laboratory achieves fast, accurate multiphysics wind-turbine blade simulations with Altair

Software simplifies simulations of smart materials (blades) and fast

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) needed a reliable, fast way to simulate smart, anisotropic wind‑turbine blades that exhibit coupled mechanical, thermal, electrical and magnetic behavior. Their challenge was to model complex composite cross‑sections and multiphysics coupling accurately without the prohibitive compute cost of full 3D finite‑element analysis.

Altair provided a variational‑asymptotic, beam‑sectional multiphysics simulation solution that reduced 3D problems to high‑fidelity 1D beam models while retaining cross‑sectional stress and strain detail. Using Altair’s approach, NREL achieved excellent agreement with a respected 3D FEA code along comparison paths, while cutting run time from 3 hours, 5 minutes, 23 seconds to just 37 seconds.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory