Open Access

ARTICLE

Local Buckling Prediction for Large Wind Turbine Blades

by W. Liu, X. Y. Su, Y. R. An, K. F. Huang¹

1 Peking Univ, LTCS and Dept Mech & Aero Engn, Coll Engn, Beijing 100871, China. Corresponding author, Email address: huangkefu@gmail.com (K. F. Huang).

Computers, Materials & Continua 2011, 25(2), 177-194. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmc.2011.025.177

Abstract

Local buckling is a typical failure mode of large scale composite wind turbine blades. A procedure for predicting the onset and location of local buckling of composite wind turbine blades under aerodynamic loads is proposed in this paper. This procedure is distinct from its counterparts in adopting the pressure distributions obtained from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculations as the loads. The finite element method is employed to investigate local buckling resistance of the composite blade. To address the mismatch between the unstructured CFD grids of the blade surface and the finite shell elements used during the buckling analysis, an interpolation code is developed, allowing mapping the pressure computed by using CFD to the finite element model. With the well documented National Renewable Energy Laboratory phase VI wind turbine blade, the procedure is demonstrated to be capable of yielding satisfactory results. Comparison with results obtained by using the blade surface pressure distributions calculated using a simple method is also conducted.

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Keywords

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