Wind turbine design : multi-objective optimization

Within the last 20 years, wind turbines have reached matured and the growingworldwide wind energy market will allow further improvements. In the recentdecades, the numbers of research papers that have applied optimization techniquesin the attempt to obtain an optimal design have increased. The main target ofmanufacturers has been to minimize the cost of energy of wind turbines in order tocompete with fossil‐fuel sources. Therefore, it has been argued that it is morestimulating to evaluate the wind turbine design as an optimization problemconsisting of more than one objective. Using multi‐objective optimization algo‐rithms, the designers are able to identify a trade‐off curve called Pareto front thatreveals the weaknesses, anomalies and rewards of certain targets. In this chapter, wepresent the fundamental principles of multi‐objective optimization in wind turbinedesign and solve a classic multi‐objective wind turbine optimization problem usinga genetic algorithm