DTU’s blade research and demonstration platform

Philipp U Haselbach,Peter Berring,Sergei Semenov

doi:10.1088/1757-899x/942/1/012043

Philipp U Haselbach, Peter Berring + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1088/1757-899x/942/1/012043

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Abstract

At DTU Wind Energy, a 12.6 m wind turbine rotor blade and the corresponding blade moulds were designed and manufactured to establish a blade research and demonstration platform. The blade research and demonstration platform shall allow manufacturing of a blade or blade segments under controlled conditions, allowing realizing theoretical concepts and testing these in full-scale for materials, manufacturing and design concepts of next generation wind turbines. For this purpose, the entire blade design with detailed airfoil and structural design as well as the manufacturing and test data of the blade will be published. Static tests, fatigue tests, post-fatigue static tests as well as a modal testing of the manufactured rotor blade are planned to characterize the blade response. In this way, the DTU 12.6m wind turbine rotor blade and the blade moulds can serve as a reference rotor blade to benchmark numerical simulations and to test new materials, designs, manufacturing concepts or embedded sensors for future prognostics health management systems. In this article, results of a 3D scan of the blade moulds are presented as well as description of the water-based heating and cooling system and a resistance temperature detectors (RTD) measuring system.

Highlights

The DTU 12.6 m wind turbine rotor blade and the blade moulds can serve as a reference rotor blade to benchmark numerical simulations and to test new materials, designs, manufacturing concepts or embedded sensors for future prognostics health management systems
Development of new materials or structural concepts for wind turbine rotor blades requires a transformation of the initial idea via prototypes to a final product.Testing new concepts, materials or manufacturing approaches on small scale and comparing the results with reference cases is often desired to demonstrate the potential of an innovations before applying them on fullscale to large wind turbine blades
The water-based heating and cooling system demonstrated to heat up the blade mould effectively and to lead to a fairly uniform heat distribution after a short time

Summary

Introduction

Development of new materials or structural concepts for wind turbine rotor blades requires a transformation of the initial idea via prototypes to a final product.Testing new concepts, materials or manufacturing approaches on small scale and comparing the results with reference cases is often desired to demonstrate the potential of an innovations before applying them on fullscale to large wind turbine blades. There exist a few public available reference wind turbine systems and wind turbine blade designs, e.g. the NREL 5 MW reference wind turbine [1] or the DTU 10 MW reference wind turbine [2]. These reference wind turbine concepts are mainly designed to serve as benchmark concepts for model-to-model comparison with focus on aerodynamic and aeroelastic content. The wind turbine blade structural representation is often reduced to stiffness matrix inputs [1] or only roughly described [2] without documenting structural details as e.g. the design of adhesive joints or ply drops

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