Manufacture of High-Performance Tidal Turbine Blades Using Advanced Composite Manufacturing Technologies

Abstract

After wind and solar energy, tidal energy presents the most prominent opportunity for generating energy from renewable sources. However, due to the harsh environment that tidal turbines are deployed in, a number of design and manufacture challenges are presented to engineers. As a consequence of the harsh environment, the loadings on the turbine blades are much greater than that on wind turbine blades and, therefore, require advanced solutions to be able to survive in this environment. In order to avoid issues with corrosion, tidal turbine blades are mainly manufactured from fibre reinforced polymer composite material. As a result, the main design and manufacture challenges are related to the main structural aspects of the blade, which are the spar and root, and the connection between the blade and the turbine hub. Therefore, in this paper, a range of advanced manufacturing technologies for producing a 1 MW tidal turbine blade are developed. The main novelty in this study comes with the challenges that are overcome due to the size of the blade, resulting in thickness composite sections (> 130 mm in places), the fast changes in geometry over a short length that isn’t the case for wind blades and the required durability of the material in the marine environment. These advances aim to increase the likelihood of survival of tidal turbine blades in operation for a design life of 20 + years.

Advanced process simulations for thick-section epoxy powder composite structures

“…Maguire et al [15] performed a series of experiments to validate 1D simulations of the epoxy powder composite system. In relation to 3D heat transfer, the FEA model was validated against thermocouple data, which was provided by an industrial partner [18]. This section will provide a direct comparison of those experimental results and the simulated results from this present work.…”

“…Thermocouple temperature plots for a 48-ply UD laminate are shown in Figure 3 In the case of 3D validation, a 96-ply laminate was produced by Finnegan et al [18] using the same triaxial semi-preg system used in [15]. The 400 x 400 mm laminate was manufactured in an oven with thermocouples placed in the centre of the laminate and 100 mm from its edge.…”

“…As part of the European Framework projects, MARINCOMP and POWDERBLADE, significant research has been carried out to assist with the development of this powder-based VBO prepreg system [11,[14][15][16][17][18]. In relation to process modelling and simulation, previous investigations focussed on describing the system in a one-dimensional (1D) space i.e.…”

Modelling and simulation of tidal energy generation system: a systematic literature review

“…about 1.4% which is higher than using the comparison between efficiencies achieved analytically and experimentally with CFD computation only. The works in [61,79] evaluated the impacts of extracting tidal energy on hydrodynamics and in a tidal channel motion processed at a coastal ocean. The authors also carried out a simulation comparison of the momentum sink technique and the quadratic bottom friction technique.…”

Determinations and performance investigations of hybrid composite properties for hydrokinetic turbine blades

“…These blades are immersed in water continually and are subjected to a variety of loading conditions. 3 1 Material selection is a major factor in the determination of turbine performance. Water immersion can lead to erosion by cavitation and impact by solid material convected by the water, corrosion, and water absorption, among other issues.…”