Comparison of the Buckling Performance of Grid Stiffened and Sandwich Structures designed for Wind Turbine Blade Trailing Panels
R.W.J. de Ronde (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
J.M.J.F. van Campen – Mentor (TU Delft - Aerospace Structures & Computational Mechanics)
Sonell Shroff – Mentor (TU Delft - Aerospace Manufacturing Technologies)
F. Lahuerta Calahorra – Mentor (Knowledge Centre WMC)
Roeland De Breuker – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Aerospace Structures & Computational Mechanics)
Julie Teuwen – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Aerospace Manufacturing Technologies)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Future wind turbines require larger rotor blade radius, leading to an increase of rotor swept area. The larger rotor swept area results in more energy production of the wind turbine. Further increase is however limited as a result of the structural weight, which induces a large bending moment and could result in buckling of the rotor blade. An innovative design solution resulting in a lower weight blade design could be acquired by introducing a grid stiffened structure as a substitution of the conventional sandwich structure. Design and analysis showed an increase in specific stiffness of the grid stiffened structure for higher loading conditions. In an attempt to validate the obtained results, one sandwich and one orthogrid panel has been manufactured and tested.