Abstract
The Froude-scaled offshore floating wind turbine model is inevitably affected by the Reynolds number effect, making the model unable to correctly reproduce the thrust performance of the reference wind turbine (RWT). To solve this problem, an Xfoil-AirfoilPrep-Matlab (XAM) system and a wide tip speed ratio search method (WTSM) are proposed to design a wide tip speed ratio (TSR) thrust-match model blade. The XAM system is utilized to select the best airfoil for WTSM by calculating the lift and drag coefficients of several airfoils. The WTSM is utilized to optimize the blade chord and twist. It formalizes the blade chord and twist by polynomials and then optimizes the polynomial coefficients. The thrust coefficients construct the optimization object at different TSRs. For validating the effect of the redesigned blade, the thrust performance is compared to that of the RWT blade. In addition, the thrust performance of redesigned blade at different pitch angles is also calculated and compared to those of the RWT blade. Results show that the thrust performance of redesigned blade matches well with that of the RWT blade at 0 pitch angle, and it can also match the variations of that of the RWT blade at the other pitch angles well.