Over the past thirty years the average size of offshore wind turbines has grown, with rotor diameters growing
from 10m to 160m. It therefore becomes increasingly important to simulate the complex dynamics involved with
unsteady and turbulent flow through rotating blades, and the large structural deformations of blades, in order to
optimise their design.

The motivation is to produce software capable of solving coupled Fluid Structure Interaction(FSI) problems to
investigate the dynamics of wind turbines; both individually and ultimately in arrays relevant to farm configura-
tions. The project will focus on coupling OpenFOAM to ParaFEM in such a way as to minimise communication
bottleneck and to maximise performance of the software.

The developed software uses a partitioned approach, with OpenFOAM and ParaFEM acting as blackbox fluid and structural solvers respectively. Using this approach makes use of already existing models and solution algorithms that have been previously validated, and the user has the versatility to select the CFD and FEM models independently. Explicit coupling is used with a conventional staggered scheme to solve the governing equations. The software will be highly parallel allowing large complex problems to be run with sufficient accuracy in a reasonable time scale on High Performance Computers.
During the conference I will be describing the implementation of the software and presenting the results and
performance of it to classical FSI benchmark problems, such as the one proposed by Hron and Turek, and a
vertical beam subject to a cross flow in which there is an analytical solution.

The FSI modelling offers the potential to accurately predict the deforming blades shape across a range of load
conditions and thus improve the prediction of blade efficiency and noise production. Furthermore, aside from
evaluating the potential benefit of using ParaFEM over other available structural solvers, the software aims to
demonstrate efficient code-code coupling in the eventual context of true multiscale simulation.