Hi all,
Is there any way that I can perform stress analysis for a wind turbine blade?
Dear Khaled,
The typically design approach is to use a full-system dynamics model–such as FAST–in order to model the coupled dynamics of the complete system, considering wind, aerodynamics, structural dynamics, and the controller over a range of operating and nonoperating conditions. The outputs of these simulations are the ultimate and fatigue loads (shear forces, bending moments, etc.) throughout the various components of the turbine, such as the blades, hub, drivetrain, and tower. These outputs are then used to feed FE-based models of individual components in order to determine the stress distributions. For a blade, this could be e.g. ANSYS through NuMAD (energy.sandia.gov/energy/renewab … ool-numad/) or VABS.
Best regards,
Dear Jason,
Thank you for your reply. The problem is I just want to check whether the blade material will fail or not under given wind conditions and composite material layup. I think using ANSYS will be so much complicated for such a problem especially when repeating this problem several times to test various designs. The question is : is there any light and simple FE analysis software that can be used to simulate stresses??
Dear Khaled,
I’m not aware of a “simple FE analysis software” for composite blades. VABS is “easier” than e.g. ANSYS because in VABS one must only define a 2D FE mesh of the cross section of interest as opposed to the 3D FE mesh needed by e.g. ANSYS, but VABS would be less accurate in that it would not be able to predict 3D stress concentrations possible with e.g. ANSYS.
Best regards,
Hi Khaled,
you might look at Co-Blade, which is a “light and simple” alternative to full finite-element analysis. The code can be found here: github.com/nnmrec/Co-Blade). Anyways, something like VABS and NuMAD are more accurate methods … but Co-Blade is computationally fast and can couple to optimization methods for prelimiary design and checking failure criteria.
best,
Danny Sale
University of Washington
PhD student - Mechanical Engineering
depts.washington.edu/nnmrec/