Abstract
After wind and solar energy, tidal energy presents the most prominent opportunity for generating energy from renewable sources. However, due to the harsh environment that tidal turbines are deployed in, a number of design and manufacture challenges are presented to engineers. As a consequence of the harsh environment, the loadings on the turbine blades are much greater than that on wind turbine blades and, therefore, require advanced solutions to be able to survive in this environment. In order to avoid issues with corrosion, tidal turbine blades are mainly manufactured from fibre reinforced polymer composite material. As a result, the main design and manufacture challenges are related to the main structural aspects of the blade, which are the spar and root, and the connection between the blade and the turbine hub. Therefore, in this paper, a range of advanced manufacturing technologies for producing a 1 MW tidal turbine blade are developed. The main novelty in this study comes with the challenges that are overcome due to the size of the blade, resulting in thickness composite sections (> 130 mm in places), the fast changes in geometry over a short length that isn’t the case for wind blades and the required durability of the material in the marine environment. These advances aim to increase the likelihood of survival of tidal turbine blades in operation for a design life of 20 + years.
Highlights
As the global tidal stream energy sector moves closer to commercial viability, additional challenges are presented as developers strive to lower the levelised cost of energy in order to challenge the low cost associated with generating energy from fossil fuels
This paper presented a large case study of an 8-m tidal turbine blade, where the challenges relating to thick composite sections at the root and along the spar caps (> 130 mm in places), the fast changes in geometry over a short length that isn’t the case for wind blades and the required durability of the material in the marine environment had been overcome
The results show that CPET is a suitable material for parts operating in harsh marine environments, such as wind and tidal energy as well as boats
Summary
As the global tidal stream energy sector moves closer to commercial viability, additional challenges are presented as developers strive to lower the levelised cost of energy in order to challenge the low cost associated with generating energy from fossil fuels. One of the key components for many tidal energy converters is the turbine blades, whether they are vertically, horizontally or otherwise orientated During operation, these blades encounter high, variable loading conditions, including impact loadings, while being constantly submerged in water. Robust connections between these two sections and at the root, along with thick section composite structures, are often used to withstand these high forces and moments When designing these key structural components, advanced numerical models have been developed for tidal turbine blades [2,3,4], which includes damage prediction modelling [5] and the effect of the environment on mechanical performance of the blade materials [6, 7]
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