Structural Optimization of Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine Blades

Abstract

Designers of modern wind turbines are more interested in stiffer and lighter blade designs as the growth of their size leads to reducing the production costs of electrical energy. The present work introduces a design analysis framework for wind turbines, using a combination of tools specially developed for this purpose. SNL 100-00 is taken as a reference wind turbine blade originally designed by Sandia National Labs. This blade is chosen as a case study to implement the proposed methodology. The first step in the methodology is to model the blade structure using two pre-processing python scripts: (1) Airfoil2BECAS to create a 2D finite element shell model for each cross-section and (2) Shellexpander to generate the input files which are needed by the cross-sectional analysis software BECAS.