QBlade

QBlade is especially adequate for teaching, as it provides a ’hands-on’ feeling for Horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) rotor design and shows all the fundamental relationships between blade twist, blade chord, section airfoil performance, turbine control, power and load curves in an easy and intuitive way.

QBlade Community Edition (QBlade-CE 2.0.4) includes all functionality that is required for the aero-servo-hydro-elastic simulation of wind turbines.

For the structural dynamics modelling QBlade integrates the Project Chrono multi-physics library.

It is maintained and continuously developed at the Hermann Föttinger Institute of TU Berlin (Chair of Fluid Dynamics) and at QBlade.org.

QBlade has been successfully validated against the WT_Perf Blade Element Momentum Theory code of NWTC.

HAWT and VAWT Rotors designed with QBlade
Graph of Rotor Torque over Wind Speed for a 10m rotor-diameter stall turbine. The turbine rotor design data are extracted from the NREL International Energy Agency Annex XIV and Annex XVIII turbine tested at the NASA Ames wind tunnel. The comparative curves represent the simulation results between QBlade and WT_Perf (BEM code of NREL)