Fast Prototype Blade Design

Abstract

One of the most obvious and promising solutions to bringing down cost of wind energy is continued improvement of energy output per structural load. For the blade designer this boils down to the task of designing a blade with a desired energy output and an optimized ratio of energy per load. Since the wind industry is not yet at a stage where all performance and loading aspects of new blade types can be determined with full certainty on a purely theoretical and analytical basis, manufacturing and testing of full-scale prototypes remains a fundamental cornerstone. The paper presents a fast prototyping development platform. This platform enables complete blade layout optimization as well as nested optimizations of sub-component entities such as airfoils and laminate plans. Validation comes at various levels, both numerically from more advanced models that are not applicable for large scale optimization, and from physical tests, e.g. wind tunnel profile measurements. First, the detailed workflow of the fast prototyping development platform is laid out. Then a specific and recent example of a multi-MW blade design optimization is given, and finally the results are discussed and a path for process improvements is suggested.