This video presents the three commonly used methods for the evaluation of wind turbine aerodynamics including

00:02:19 Blade element momentum (BEM)
00:43:38 Free vortex wake (FVW)
00:50:57 Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

Traditionally, it is common to use the BEM theory to assess the aerodynamic behavior of a wind turbine. However, over the recent years, the size of wind turbines, especially the offshore ones, has undergone a dramatic increase due to substantial economic benefits. The large blades of these huge machines are subject to large deformations due to increased flexibility and nonstraight prebended blades. This, as a result, complicates highly the aerodynamics of wind turbines, where the lowfidelity BEM method is unable to predict accurately the machine behavior. This calls for aerodynamic models capable of capturing accurately the machine aerodynamics under large deformations of blades. Therefore, this has led to the development of FVW and CFD methods, which are capable of modeling more accurately the complex physics related to aerodynamics of largescale wind turbines.