Buckling behavior of wind turbine blade

Abstract

The use of composite materials is growing up compared to the traditional materials, in basically all the industrial domains, where we need powerful, lightweight and cost effective structures. An example of a challenging lightweight structure made of composite materials are wind turbine blades. Indeed, the modern wind turbine blades are becoming dramatically bigger, and nowadays a length of a standard one is over 60 m. The wind turbine blades are often facing extremely complex loads due to environmental conditions they are working in. One of the main loading acting on the wind turbine bale are pressure load, which can engender flap wise and edgewise bending. On the other hand, the consequence of optimum design strategy, the wind turbine blades are becoming thin-walled structures, which raise the risk of buckling phenomena. Therefore, the understanding of the wind turbine blade behaviour under this kind of aforementioned load is very crucial. In this study, the buckling behaviour of the spar cap of a wind turbine blade using the finite element method is investigated. For so doing, a generic NACA 634- 421 airfoil section is considered. The spar cap is taken as a multilayer curved cylindrical shell. A parametric study is made in order to study the effect of material choice, stacking sequence and number of layers on the buckling resistance of the spar cap. The results showed that the buckling load is very sensitive to the considered parameters.