Supervisor: Lars Pilgaard Mikkelsen, DTU Wind Energy
Co-supervisor: Philipp Ulrich Haselbach, DTU Wind Energy
Examiner: Erik Lund, AAU
The defence is a part of the Online Wind Energy Master
About the Online Wind Energy Master
The part-time master programme is scheduled to take two to four years, making it possible for participants to study while working. The participants come from all over the world and in August, the first participants graduate.
On Friday August 30, 2019, there will be a reception in B118 for the eight graduates.
Abstract: Material Choice and Blade Design
Most current wind turbine blades are made of composites, due to their good stiffness and strength to weight ratio. However, other structural materials present some advantages with respect to composites, in terms of cost or sustainability. A blade model has been developed to evaluate the influence of using glass fibre reinforced plastic, carbon fibre reinforced plastic, different aluminium alloys or bamboo-based composite as the load carrying beam material; namely, blade beam weight, tip deflection, cost and environmental footprint are predicted. On the one hand, it can be seen that the design of blades made of glass fibre reinforced plastic or bamboo-based composite is driven by blade deflection; for these cases, an optimisation algorithm to find the lowest blade weight to meet the deflection requirement has been included. On the other hand, using aluminium or carbon fibre reinforced plastic lead to a design controlled by fatigue strength.
Comparing against the most common glass fibre blades, it is found that using carbon fibre reinforced plastic leads to much lighter blades, at a higher cost that might be worth, whereas bamboo-based composite blades present excellent environmental qualities at low cost and reasonable weight. Aluminium blades result to be heavier and more expensive than the other options.