Structural Analysis of a Composite Wind Turbine Blade to Optimize Its Constructional Parameters Using a Fea Software

The overall goal of this project is to gain an understanding of wind turbine blades sufficient to develop Figures of Merit analysing the trade-offs between structure, material, cost, and other qualities in order to optimize the design of a large wind turbine blade. Due to the size of emergent utility-scale wind turbines, concerns that in current technology are minimal (such as weight), have the potential to add new dimensions to the driving design conditions. These additions are not necessarily captured by traditional wind turbine analytical solutions, and it has been wished to factor them into the analyses presented in the present work. In the due course of this project analytical solutions have been developed for various aerodynamic loads, along with rudimentary root size estimations. These analytic solutions have been used to guide the initial blade sizing and geometry, but transitioned to computational analysis tools like WT_Perf and ANSYS later on in order to more efficiently vary key design parameters and obtain additional accuracy in load profiles. Ultimately, optimization of several key design constraints for the blade has been done and computational results have been compared with initial analytic estimations to mixed results. Successful optimization of blade design has been done at key core levels. But detail many of the desired figures of merit have net been possible to develop. FOM has been obtained for structural stability and cost, but future work will be required to further evaluate these and others.