Wind turbine blade coating leading edge rain erosion model: Development and validation

Wind Energy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 942-951 ◽  
Author(s):  
Drew Eisenberg ◽  
Steffen Laustsen ◽  
Jason Stege
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Finnegan ◽  
Priya Dasan Keeryadath ◽  
Rónán Ó Coistealbha ◽  
Tomas Flanagan ◽  
Michael Flanagan ◽  
...  

Abstract. As the world shifts to using renewable sources of energy, wind energy has been established as one of the leading forms of renewable energy. However, as wind turbines get increasingly larger, new challenges within the design, manufacture and operation of the turbine are presented. One such challenge is leading edge erosion on wind turbine blades. With larger wind turbine blades, tip speed begin to reach over 500 km per hour. As water droplets impact along the leading edge of the blade, rain erosion begins to occur, increasing maintenance costs and reducing the design life of the blade. In response to this, a new leading edge protection component (LEP) for offshore for wind turbine blades is being developed, which is manufactured from thermoplastic polyurethane. In this paper, an advanced finite element analysis (FEA) model of this new leading edge protection component has been developed. Within this study, the FEA model has been validated against experimental trials at demonstrator level, comparing the deflection and strains during testing and found to be in good agreement. The model is then applied to a full-scale wind turbine blade is then modelled with the LEP bonded onto the blade’s leading edge and compared to previously performed experimental trials, where the results were found to be well aligned when comparing the deflections of the blade. The methodology used to develop the FEA model can be applied to other wind blade designs in order to incorporate the new leading edge protection component to eliminate the risk of rain erosion and improve the sustainability of wind turbine blade manufacture, while increasing the service life of the blade.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 1567-1577
Author(s):  
William Finnegan ◽  
Priya Dasan Keeryadath ◽  
Rónán Ó Coistealbha ◽  
Tomas Flanagan ◽  
Michael Flanagan ◽  
...  

Abstract. As the world shifts to using renewable sources of energy, wind energy has been established as one of the leading forms of renewable energy. However, as wind turbines get increasingly larger, new challenges within the design, manufacture and operation of the turbine are presented. One such challenge is leading edge erosion on wind turbine blades. With larger wind turbine blades, tip speeds begin to reach over 300 km h−1. As water droplets impact along the leading edge of the blade, rain erosion begins to occur, increasing maintenance costs and reducing the design life of the blade. In response to this, a new leading edge protection component (LEP) for offshore for wind turbine blades is being developed, which is manufactured from thermoplastic polyurethane. In this paper, an advanced finite element analysis (FEA) model of this new leading edge protection component has been developed. Within this study, the FEA model has been validated against experimental trials at demonstrator level, comparing the deflection and strains during testing, and was found to be in good agreement. The model is then applied to a full-scale wind turbine blade and is then modelled with the LEP bonded onto the blade's leading edge and compared to previously performed experimental trials, where the results were found to be well aligned when comparing the deflections of the blade. The methodology used to develop the FEA model can be applied to other wind blade designs in order to incorporate the new leading edge protection component to eliminate the risk of rain erosion and improve the sustainability of wind turbine blade manufacture while increasing the service life of the blade.


Author(s):  
Amrit Shankar Verma ◽  
Zhiyu Jiang ◽  
Marco Caboni ◽  
Hans Verhoef ◽  
Harald van der Mijle Meijer ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
GholamHossein Maleki ◽  
Ali Reza Davari ◽  
Mohammad Reza Soltani

An extensive experimental investigation was conducted to study the effects of Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD), on the flow field of an airfoil at low Reynolds number. The DBD was mounted near the leading edge of a section of a wind turbine blade. It is believed that DBD can postpone the separation point on the airfoil by injecting momentum to the flow. The effects of steady actuations on the velocity profiles in the wake region have been investigated. The tests were performed at α = 4 to 36 degrees i.e. from low to deep stall angles of attack regions. Both surface pressure distribution and wake profile show remarkable improvement at high angles of attack, beyond the static stall angle of the airfoil when the plasma actuation was implemented. The drag calculated from the wake momentum deficit has further shown the favorable role of the plasma actuators to control the flow over the airfoil at incidences beyond the static stall angle of attack of this airfoil. The results demonstrated that DBD has been able to postpone the stall onset significantly. It has been observed that the best performance for the plasma actuation for this airfoil is in the deep stall angles of attack range. However, below and near the static stall angles of attack, plasma augmentation was pointed out to have a negligible improvement in the aerodynamic behavior.


2008 ◽  
Vol 130 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvaro Gonzalez ◽  
Xabier Munduate

This work undertakes an aerodynamic analysis over the parked and the rotating NREL Phase VI wind turbine blade. The experimental sequences from NASA Ames wind tunnel selected for this study respond to the parked blade and the rotating configuration, both for the upwind, two-bladed wind turbine operating at nonyawed conditions. The objective is to bring some light into the nature of the flow field and especially the type of stall behavior observed when 2D aerofoil steady measurements are compared to the parked blade and the latter to the rotating one. From averaged pressure coefficients together with their standard deviation values, trailing and leading edge separated flow regions have been found, with the limitations of the repeatability of the flow encountered on the blade. Results for the parked blade show the progressive delay from tip to root of the trailing edge separation process, with respect to the 2D profile, and also reveal a local region of leading edge separated flow or bubble at the inner, 30% and 47% of the blade. For the rotating blade, results at inboard 30% and 47% stations show a dramatic suppression of the trailing edge separation, and the development of a leading edge separation structure connected with the extra lift.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessio Castorrini ◽  
Paolo Venturini ◽  
Fabrizio Gerboni ◽  
Alessandro Corsini ◽  
Franco Rispoli

Abstract Rain erosion of wind turbine blades represents an interesting topic of study due to its non-negligible impact on annual energy production of the wind farms installed in rainy sites. A considerable amount of recent research works has been oriented to this subject, proposing rain erosion modelling, performance losses prediction, structural issues studies, etc. This work aims to present a new method to predict the damage on a wind turbine blade. The method is applied here to study the effect of different rain conditions and blade coating materials, on the damage produced by the rain over a representative section of a reference 5MW turbine blade operating in normal turbulence wind conditions.


Wind Energy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 953-966
Author(s):  
Ryan Kyle ◽  
Fan Wang ◽  
Brian Forbes

Author(s):  
Weifei Hu ◽  
Weiyi Chen ◽  
Xiaobo Wang ◽  
Zhenyu Liu ◽  
Jianrong Tan ◽  
...  

Abstract With the increase of wind energy production demand, the need to manufacture larger wind turbine blades is on the rise. Because of the high tip speed of the large blade, the blade could be impacted by high-speed objects such as raindrops. This research focuses on developing a computational model for analyzing wind turbine blade coating fatigue induced by raindrop impact. A stochastic rain texture model is used to simulate a realistic rain event determined by a rain intensity and a rain duration. A smoothed particle hydrodynamic approach is implemented to calculate the impact stress considering a single raindrop. A stress interpolation method is proposed to accurately and efficiently estimate the impact of stress under a random rain event. Besides, a crack growth law is used to explain the process of coating shedding. Through a method for calculating crack growth length based on stress, this paper analyzes crack growth life as a function of the rain intensity and the rain duration. This function, together with the statistics of rainfall history, provides a new approach for estimating the expected fatigue life of the blade coating.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Can Muyan ◽  
Demirkan Coker

Abstract. Full-scale structural tests enable us to monitor mechanical response of the blades under various loading scenarios. Yet these tests must be accompanied with numerical simulations, so that the physical basis of the progressive damage development can be captured and interpreted correctly. Within the scope of this paper the previous work of the authors concerning the strength analysis of an existing 5-m GFRP wind turbine blade using Puck failure criteria is revisited. An important outcome of the previous study was that nonlinear Puck material model was found to be necessary for a more realistic simulation of failure mechanisms. In the current work, under extreme load cases internal flange at the leading edge, trailing edge of the blade are identified as the mainly damaged regions. Moreover, dominant failure mechanism is expected to be the de-bonding at the trailing and leading edges. When extreme load case is applied as a combination of edge-wise and flap-wise loading cases, less damage is observed compared to the pure flap-wise loading case. This damage evolution is attributed to the stiffer structural behavior of the blade under combined loading condition.


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