Structural analysis of composite wind turbine blade using advanced beam model approach

In this paper, a structural analysis of a composite rotor blade for a small wind turbine was attempted by adopting an advanced beam model. To fulfill the general light-weight requirement, various composite materials were used. The present beam modeling approach included two-dimensional cross-sectional analyses and a geometrically exact one-dimensional beam analysis. These efforts led to a much lower cost in terms of computational time and resources. Thus, it was found to be appropriate for iterative evaluations of blade design candidates. However, it was also expected that the proposed approach may be limited in terms of its ability to model complicated three-dimensional blade structures. Thus, to evaluate the present approach with regard to such a limitation, a threedimensional finite element model of such a blade was constructed using CATIA V5 and MSC. PATRAN. For a precise simulation of the actual operating conditions, the influences of aerodynamic and centrifugal loads were considered simultaneously for a static analysis as part of both analyses. Finally, the advantages and limitations of the current approach were investigated and discussed through comparisons with the results by NASTRAN. Possible improvements in terms of the accuracy of the proposed approach were also extracted and discussed.