Development of smart wind turbine blades

Development of smart wind turbine blades

Recent years have witnessed the use of wind as renewable energy source. This rapid growth has tremendously developed since the growing concern of the environmental pollution and also oil crisis. The size of the blades is a major factor in the power output of a wind turbine and as a result, blade length has tremendously increased in line with the growth of the wind turbine industry. However, the rapid expansion in use and size of wind turbines contribute its problems. Among the problem is maintaining the shape control at high load especially which substantially affect the aerodynamic efficiency of the airfoil of the wind blade. The structure of the wind blade is made of glass fibre reinforced plastic (GFRP) which is not only has high strength-to-weight ratio and also good rigidity. Nevertheless, it can't resist the shape upon operational air loading such as deflection from root to tip. The higher stress levels acting on the blade root will also contributes to the accumulation of fatigue damages and consequently catastrophic failures. This study intends to experimentally investigate the application of smart materials in composite wind turbine blades like structures. Nickel-Titanium (NiTi) wire which is classified as Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) has been embedded in the core of a graded beam to alleviate the load at the fixed. This corrective action relieves the high stress concentration at blade root and as a consequence minimizes fatigue damages to the blade. The study closely look at the heat load needs to be applied, the transformation temperatures, the recovery stress of NiTi. The recovery stress is very important in structural application for SMA as the recovered stress could be purposely for actuation and damping control in composite blades. A mathematical model has been developed on commercial finite element software ABAQUS for comparison.

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