OPTIMAL DESIGN FOR A COMPOSITE WIND TURBINE BLADE WITH FATIGUE AND FAILURE CONSTRAINTS

The search for more efficient and sustainable renewable energies is rapidly growing. Throughout the years, wind turbines matured towards a lowered cost-of-energy and have grown in rotor size therefore stretched the role of composite materials that offered the solution to more flexible, lighter and stronger blades. The objective of this paper is to present an improved version of the preliminary optimization tool called Co-Blade, which will offer designers and engineers an accelerated design phase by providing the capabilities to rapidly evaluate alternative composite layups and study their effects on static failure and fatigue of wind turbine blades. In this study, the optimization formulations include non-linear failure constraints. In addition a comparison between 3 formulations is made to show the importance of choosing the blade mass as the main objective function and the inclusion of failure constraints in the wind turbine blade design.