Publications Details

Analytical method to determine a tip loss factor for highly-loaded wind turbine rotors

Schmitz, Sven; Maniaci, David C.

The commonly observed overprediction of tip loads on wind turbine blades by classical blade-element momentum theory is investigated by means of an analytical method that determines the tip loss factor for a given blade flow angle including tip vortex rollup. The higher-order free-wake method, Wind DVE, is used to compute the actual rollup process in the near wake of a highly-loaded wind turbine rotor. The resulting spanwise distributions of the blade flow angle serve as input to the analytical method that is subsequently tested for the NREL Phase VI rotor by implementing a corrected tip loss factor into the blade-element code, XTurb.