Abstract
Composite wind blades of 1m long comprising glass-fabric/epoxy skins and a sandwich plate-type spar were designed and fabricated for static testing. In the composite wind blades, the spar supports the top and bottom skins to form the airfoil shape of NACA4418. The blades were tested to failure and the failure modes were identified at different loading stages. A structural failure analysis method which consists of a geometrically nonlinear finite element (FE) model and appropriate phenomenological failure criteria is used to study the progressive failure behaviours of the blades subjected to different types of quasi-static loads. The experimental load-displacement curves as well as failure loads and locations for different failure modes are used to validate the suitability of the proposed failure analysis method.
Highlights
In a wind turbine, the wind blades are used to convert wind energy to electrical power
A wind blade has to be able to sustain the extreme wind loads that may occur during its lifetime
Such load carrying capacity requirement has made the failure analysis of a wind turbine blade become an important topic of research, especially the determination of the failure behaviour of the blade under an extreme wind load
Summary
The wind blades are used to convert wind energy to electrical power. The progressive failure behaviour of 1m long composite wind blades comprising a sandwich spar is studied via both experimental and theoretical approaches. The top and bottom skins which are adhesively connected to the spar to form the aerodynamic profile of the blade are adhesively bound to two glass fiber/epoxy stiffeners at, respectively, the leading and trailing edge to prevent delamination or opening failure mode from occurring at these edges. The numbers of glass fabric/epoxy layers in the skins vary along the span of the blade. For the composite sandwich spar web, each glass fabric face sheet comprises 3 glass fabric/epoxy layers and the core is a 2 mm thick Balsa wood panel.
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