Fatigue Assessment Method for Composite Wind Turbine Blade

Fatigue strength assessment of a horizontal axis wind turbine(HAWT)composite blade is considered.Fatigue load cases are identified,and loads are calculated by the GH Bladed software which is specified at the IEC61400 international specification and GL(Germanisher Lloyd)regulations for the wind energy conversion system.Stress analysis is performed with a 3-D finite element method(FEM).Considering Saint-Venant′s principle,a uniform cross section FEM model is built at each critical zone.Stress transformation matrixes(STM)are set up by applied six unit load components on the FEM model separately.STM can be used to convert the external load into stresses in the linear elastic range.The main material of composite wind turbine blade is fiber reinforced plastics(FRP).In order to evaluate the degree of fatigue damage of FRP,the stresses of fiber direction are extracted and the well-known strength criterion-Puck theory is used.The total fatigue damage of each laminate on the critical point is counted by the rain-flow counting method and Miner′s damage law based on general S-N curves.Several sections of a 45.3mblade of a 2 MW wind turbine are studied using the fatigue evaluation method.The performance of this method is compared with far more costly business software FOCUS.The results show that the fatigue damage of multi-axis FRP can be assessed conveniently by the FEM-STM method.And the proposed method gives a reliable and efficient method to analyze the fatigue damage of slender composite structure with variable cross-sections.