Towards the optimization of wind turbine rotor blades by means of computational fluid dynamics and the adjoint approach

Optimization of the aeroelastic performance of wind turbines has a positive effect on the cost-effectiveness of wind energy. Hence, the development and implementation of reliable optimization methods to be used in the de- sign process is currently an important field of research. In this work a tool using the adjoint approach and stationary computational fluid dynamics is developed and tested. Applications to automatically process a rotor blade are implemented, such as an automatized pre-processing tool for the later projection of gradients and mesh movement. The applications are tested with 2D and 3D test cases. A preliminary aerodynamic optimization of a rotating blade was conducted.