Some will already know the wind turbine hub model, but now I have taken the time and remade the model in Ansys Mechanical. At the latest, the following animated image should bring back memories of “Wind turbine hub calculation in PrePoMax“.
I am surprised how similar the deformations and stresses are, although a completely different mesh was used. Furthermore, I have changed the fatigue.pro label so that this area is now more softer.
The new mesh in Ansys is a full Hexaeder mesh (Hex20 & Wedge15 only) with 1.31 million nodes and 267984 elements. In PrePoMax was used a coarser full Tetrahedron mesh with 1.4 million nodes and 810054 elements (see “Wind turbine hub calculation in PrePoMax“).
How is it possible to create such a hex mesh in Ansys Mechanical. Following video showing the steps to build up the model. You find more details of the model and the used loads in “Wind turbine hub calculation in PrePoMax“.
When we compare the stresses in detail, the depth of the fatigue.pro label and the influence of the fineness of the mesh become more noticeable. So we can see slightly lower stress values at the hole edge. I am curious what the results would look like with the Ansys mesh in PrePoMax. Maybe I will port the Ansys mesh to PrePoMax in the future.
In the following animation you can check how the stress in the wind turbine hub is changing during rotation.
Even the full wind turbine hub model shows a good stress distribution. The very simplified bearing model have some high stress and needs a more realistic nonlinear model. And even preloaded blade bolts would change the stress results in that area.
I have already calculated many such models with Ansys, so I just want to show the procedure in the software and the results. And for me it is still impressive how close the results with PrePoMax are to this calculation.