RENEWABLES
NABLA
WIND
Preliminary wind turbine design,
aerodynamics through to cost
WHAT IT IS
A collection of simulation tools for designing, validating and optimising wind turbines
CHALLENGE
Preliminary design needs answers fast enough to compare configurations, not one answer three weeks later
RESULT
Aerodynamic performance, structural response and cost-effectiveness, from 0D to 3D, validated against wind tunnel data
01
CHALLENGE
Preliminary design is a search, not a calculation: many configurations, each needing an answer quickly enough that the next one can be tried. Three things have to hold at once — the aerodynamic design has to be efficient across wind speeds and angles, the structure has to survive extreme weather in the materials chosen, and the whole thing has to be worth building, which matters most at small scale.
02
SOLUTION
NablaWIND combines the models the field actually uses: Blade Element Momentum theory, correction models for dynamic stall, panel methods, aeroelasticity, CFD, FEM, and optimisation on top of all of them.
It is a collection rather than a single solver, built over ten years of designing, validating and testing commercial turbines and research concepts, so the level of fidelity can match the question instead of the question waiting for the highest-fidelity tool.
03
RESULTS
Aerodynamic performance predicted from 0D to 3D, structural response likewise, and cost-effectiveness estimated alongside both — so a design can be judged on all three at once rather than optimised for one and checked against the others later.
Internal optimisation techniques — gradient methods, genetic algorithms, neural networks and hybrids — handle multi-objective problems where aerodynamic, structural and economic goals compete. Results have been validated extensively against scientific data and wind tunnel tests. Applications: horizontal and vertical axis turbines.
