An Inverse Method for Wind Turbine Blade Design with Given Distributions of Load Coefficients

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is well orgnized. I think it should be accepted.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

This paper studies the wind turbine blade design based on an inverse method. The idea is reasonably presented. The paper is well organized and written. The following improvements are suggested before it can be recommended for publication.

1. The proposed inverse method should be compared with other existing inverse methods. The improvements and drawbacks of the proposed method should be discussed.
2. The design result of the proposed method should be dependent on the design target. However, the design target is not clearly stated in the abstract and the conclusion.
3. Some discussions on the design results from the fluid dynamics aspect are suggested.
4. Some discussions on the improvements of the design results compared to the state-of-art standard are suggested.
5. Line 42, among the aforementioned three blade design approaches…

Only two methods are discussed: the direct approach and the inverse approach.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

This paper establishes an inverse design method through combing the blade element momentum method and the multi-dimensional Newton’s method. And as has been validated in the paper, a correct force coefficient will be achieved after few steps of Newton’s iteration. This paper provides us a quick way to design different rotors with the same overall thrust or power coefficient. In the end, this paper can be improved in the following aspects:

1. Page 11: When λ is greater 183 than nine, the (i) Root-CP and (ii) Tip-CP designs have higher power coefficient than the 184 NREL-Ori design.

(ii) Tip_CP should be (iii) Root-CT

2. Wind turbine wakes should be removed from the keywords.

3. It is recommended that the sentences related with wake should be removed. For example, the last two sentences should be replaced by the key results of the present paper.

4. The blade element momentum theory is naturally 2D. BEM cannot guarantee that the conclusions made on 3D blades are correct. Maybe the difference of +2.76% or -1.33% in Table 2 is among than the uncertainty of BEM method. Validations for the BEM method are needed before making conclusions by BEM. Or citations from other papers are accepted, as long as accuracy of the BEM method is described.           Or, in a simple way, the conclusions related with BEM are removed. And this paper will focus on the inverse design method and validate this inverse method solely.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments to previous version are properly addressed.