The main objective of this text, is the validation of a new simulation code for horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWT) comparing this code with a validated code used widely in the wind energy industry. First of all, a prior understanding of how an aeroelastic simulation code works is needed; to do so in this project FAST has been chosen as the comparison tool. In this text, FAST is studied carefully with help of its documentation to see what can be done with an aeroelastic simulation tool. To plot the results and work with the data in a comfortable and easy way, Matlab software is used. To do this task, is it necessary to prepare scripts and functions to read and import FAST output data into the Matlab environment. The next step will be to understand and work with vTB code, in this text the version 0.2 of the code is going to be used. vTB is analysed to see the functions implemented on it. This step will define the conditions for the simulations and the comparison of the two tools. The turbine used as a basis model, is a public wind turbine model available for scientific and industry work, this turbine is implemented in both codes in order to give the same conditions when simulating and trying to achieve the same results. All these prior steps are needed to be able to define how the comparison is done and how further can it go, the comparison is executed in two different ways: • Analysis: This compares different parts of the codes without performing simulations. This can be, e.g. , the comparison of different modules, the study of DOFs in each model or the study of the different methods used by each code. • Simulations: To validate an aeroelastic simulation tool, different kinds of simulations need to be computed. The cases should be diferentiated by the windfield type, simulation time, control technique and number of DOFs.

Outgoing