Modeling and Analysis of a Small Wind Turbine Blade

The purpose of this paper was to structurally analyze a smaller wind turbine blade that could potentially be used in a residential setting. The proposed blade is similar in shape to the commercial blades, but it is only 1.250 meters long as opposed to the daunting 40 meter length of larger blades. The analysis was simplified by modeling a solid aluminium blade instead of a hollow carbon fibre blade, which is commonly used. This model only works to visualize and verify the bending mode of failure, but it still provided valuable information about blade failure and the validity of residential turbine blades. The effects of stresses due to a distributed wind load acting on a simplified wind turbine blade are analyzed. The goal of this paper is to understand the structural integrity of wind turbine blades.