Jae-Sung Bae
Korea Aerospace University,Korea
Title: Feasibility Study on a Fabric-Covered Wind Turbine Blade
Biography
Biography: Jae-Sung Bae
Abstract
For a couple of decades wind turbine blades become bigger than bigger to increase the performance and efficiency but the convetional design and manufacturing process of wind turbine blades have still used. As the 6 MW WT blades are developed their mass and manufacturing costs are increased significantly. The conventional design and manufacturing process might not be used for the over 10 MW WT blade in the near future. Therefore new paradaim of the WT blade desing and manufacturing should be developed.rnThe present study introduce a fabric-covered WT blade technology which is composed ofrnComposite or metal spar-rib and covering skin of fabrics as shown in Fig. 1. The proposed structurernof WT blade is similar to the truss-sin structure of the aircraft wing in World War I. In the proposedrnblade structure all of the loads should be subjected to the spars. Ribs and skins keep the shape of the blade cross-section and transfer the loads to the spars.rnIn the present study the feasibility study is performed to develop the new technology of arnfabric-coverd WT blade. A couple of blade cross-sections are designed and their structuralrnProperties are calculated by using VABS. These structural properties are compared to those of thernreference 5MW WT blade. The numerical results show that the proposed blade design could reducernthe blade mass over 30% although the present design step is preliminary.rn
