QBlade

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QBlade

A screenshot of QBlade
Developer(s) TU Berlin (Initial Development) / Open Source Community
Stable release 0.6 / January 18, 2013 (2013-01-18)
Operating system Linux, Windows
Available in English
Type Wind energy software
License GPL
Website http://q-blade.org/ & http://sourceforge.net/projects/qblade/

QBlade is an open source, cross-platform simulation software for wind turbine blade design and aerodynamic simulation. It comes with a user friendly graphical user interface (GUI) based on Qt.

Overview

QBlade is an open source wind turbine calculation software, distributed under the GNU General Public License. The software is seamlessly integrated into XFOIL, an airfoil design and analysis tool. The purpose of this software it the design and aerodynamic simulation of wind turbine blades. The integration in XFOIL allows for the user to rapidly design custom airfoils and compute their performance curves, Extrapolation the performance data to a range of 360°Angle of attack, and directly integrate them into a wind turbine rotor simulation. The integration of QBlade into XFLR's sophisticated graphical user interface makes this software accessible to a large potential user community.

QBlade is especially adequate for teaching, as it provides a ’hands-on’ feeling for HAWT rotor design and shows all the fundamental relationships between blade twist, blade chord, section airfoil performance, turbine control, power and load curves in an easy and intuitive way. QBlade also includes post processing of conducted rotor simulations and gives deep insight into all relevant blade and rotor variables.

Development History

QBlade's development started in 2009 as a small part of the PhD work of G. Pechlivanoglou at the Hermann Föttinger Institute of TU Berlin. The initial development was done by D. Marten, at the time an undergraduate student of Physical Engineering. Prof. C.O. Paschereit, head of the Hermann Föttinger Institute was a strong proponent of the idea to release QBlade under GPL and thus the software was quickly hosted on the official site of the institute. The 1st online version was received with positive remarks which led to the continuation of the development. G. Weinzierl, undergraduate student at the time initiated the development of an integrated turbulent wind field generator, while J. Wendler under the supervision of D. Marten developed the VAWT module as well as the Viterna 360° extrapolation module. M. Lennie, performed the development of a structural Euler-Bernoulli beam module (QFEM). N. Moesus further developed and integrated the code of G. Weinzierl and M. Lennie in the QBlade code. Furthermore he initiated the integration of a fully developed (GUI) for the aeroelastic code FAST inside QBlade. The completion of the integration of all the aforementioned modules in QBlade is handled by J.Wendler, N. Moesus and D. Marten and the next version of the software is expected by the end of 2013.

Current development focuses on the expansion of both the dynamic and the aerodynamic capabilities of the software as well as its export/import interface. D. Marten is the person mainly responsible for the development and supervision of future versions while G. Pechlivanoglou, G. Weinzierl, N. Moesus and J. Wendler also remain active in the project.

Functionality

The functionality of QBlade includes the following features:

  • Extrapolation of XFOIL generated or imported polar data to 360° Angle of attack.
  • Blade design and optimization, including 3D visualization, using XFOIL generated or imported airfoil.
  • Wind turbine definition (rotor blade, turbine control, generator type, losses...).
  • Computation of rotor performance over Tip speed ratio (tip speed ratio) range.
  • Computation of turbine performance over a wind speed range.
  • Annual energy yield computation based on a Weibull distribution of wind speeds.
  • Manual selection of Blade element theory correction algorithms.
  • Access to all simulation parameters for flexible use.
  • Data post processing and visualization (dynamic graphs).
  • Export functionality for all simulation data.
  • Blade geometry export functionality.
  • Storing of projects, rotors, turbines and simulations in a runtime database
HAWT and VAWT Rotors designed with QBlade

License

QBlade is distributed under the GPL license. It is maintained and continuously developed by the Hermann Föttinger Institute of TU Berlin (Chair of Fluid Dynamics).

Validation

QBlade has been successfully validated against the WT_Perf Blade Element Momentum Theory code of NWTC. Furthermore it showed good agreement with the experimental performance data measured at the NASA Ames Research Center wind tunnel during the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 10m Wind Turbine Testing campaign[1]

Graph of Rotor Torque over Wind Speed for a 10m rotor-diameter stall turbine. The turbine rotor design data are extracted from the NREL International Energy Agency Annex XIV and Annex XVIII turbine tested at the NASA Ames wind tunnel. The comparative curves represent the simulation results between QBlade and WT_Perf (BEM code of NREL)

See also

References

  1. ↑ , NREL 10-m Wind Turbine Testing in NASA Ames 80'x120' Wind Tunnel.

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to QBlade.


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