Abstract
Wind turbine blades are easily struck by lightning, a phenomenon that has attracted more and more attention in recent years. On this subject a large current experiment was conducted on three typical blade sandwich structures to simulate the natural lightning-induced arc effects. The resulting damage to different composite materials has been compared: polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) suffered pyrolysis and cracks inside, while the damage to balsa wood was fibers breaking off and large delamination between it and the resin layer, and only a little chemical pyrolysis. To analyze the damage mechanism on sandwich structures of different materials, a finite element method (FEM) model to calculate the temperature and pressure distribution was built, taking into consideration heat transfer and flow expansion due to impulse currents. According to the simulation results, PVC had the most severe temperature and pressure distribution, while PET and balsa wood were in the better condition after the experiments. The temperature distribution results explained clearly why balsa wood suffered much less chemical pyrolysis than PVC. Since balsa wood had better thermal stability than PET, the pyrolysis area of PET was obviously larger than that of balsa wood too. Increasing the volume fraction of solid components of porous materials can efficiently decrease the heat transfer velocity in porous materials. Permeability didn’t influence that much. The findings provide support for optimum material selection and design in blade manufacturing.
Highlights
Wind energy exploitation is seeing rapid development due to its renewable and environmentally-friendly characteristics
In [12], high voltage experiments were conducted to study possible breakdown positions, and the results showed that the breakdown points were mostly possible breakdown positions, and the results showed that the breakdown points were mostly located located in the sandwich areas, so the performance of the sandwich structure under the thermal effect in the sandwich areas, so the performance of the sandwich structure under the thermal effect of of lightning-induced arcs is of great importance from a blade material selection viewpoint
The resin layer airflow convection inside the porous material, so especially the very big conductedpromotes heat slowlythe andheat mosttransfer of the heat is released to the atmosphere, there was under no serious fluid velocity resulting from an impulse energy of thousands of degrees
Summary
Wind energy exploitation is seeing rapid development due to its renewable and environmentally-friendly characteristics. Lightning strikes on wind turbines, especially on the blades, have become an urgent problem as wind turbines have become higher [1,2,3,4]. Blade repair is very costly because of the required disassembly and transport, and it influences the continuity of the power supply too. Wind turbine blades are composite structures made of laminates with sandwich configurations made from individual sub-components joined together with adhesives.
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