Research Information System
9th Biennial International Conference on Engineering, Construction and Operations in Challenging Environment, Texas, United States Of America, 7 - 10 March 2004, pp.492-498
A 2.5 m long horizontal axis wind turbine rotor blade, which had been designed before, was redesigned and analyzed using different composite structures. The blade was linearly tapered and bi-linearly twisted. The different composite layout schedules that include foam core sandwich and laminated sandwich were performed to lower the weight and stiffen the structure with special consideration given to the minimization of manufacturing complexity and cost. Strain results and natural frequencies of the blade were obtained using finite element analysis by commercial FEM software HyperMesh, ABAQUS and ANSYS. It was seen that using laminated sandwich structures formed with fiberglass and foam core has benefits in minimizing the blade weight.