Publications

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The Wind Energy Technology Department at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) focuses on producing innovations in wind turbine blade technology to enable the development of longer blades that are lighter, more structurally and aerodynamically efficient, and impart reduced loads to the system. A large part of the effort is to characterize the properties of relevant composite materials built with typical manufacturing processes. This paper provides an overview of recent studies of composite laminates for wind turbine blade construction and summarizes test results for three prototype blades that incorporate a variety of material-related innovations.

The focus of this paper is on the development of validated models for wind turbine blades. Validation of these models is a comprehensive undertaking which requires carefully designing and executing experiments, proposing appropriate physics-based models, and applying correlation techniques to improve these models based on the test data. This paper will cover each of these three aspects of model validation, although the focus is on the third - model calibration. The result of the validation process is an understanding of the credibility of the model when used to make analytical predictions. These general ideas will be applied to a wind turbine blade designed, tested, and modeled at Sandia National Laboratories. The key points of the paper include discussions of the tests which are needed, the required level of detail in these tests to validate models of varying detail, and mathematical techniques for improving blade models. Results from investigations into calibrating simplified blade models are presented.

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