Research on variable stiffness optimization design of wind turbine blades based on lamination parameters

Abstract

This paper presented a variable stiffness optimization framework for wind turbine blades based on the lamination parameters, including two processes: variable stiffness design based on lamination parameters and mapping from lamination parameters to fiber orientation. Leveraging the transitional effect of lamination parameters, the variable stiffness design of composite blades is achieved by solving the optimization model which utilizes the minimum structural compliance as objective function, and the feasible domain of lamination parameters as design constraints. The realistic fiber orientations are obtained via minimizing the Huber Loss function between optimized lamination parameters and practical lamination parameters. The suggested methodology is applied in the variable stiffness optimization of a 1.5 MW composite blade and the optimized fiber angle distribution for the composite blade is obtained clearly. Compared to the initial scheme, the maximum displacement and Tsai-Wu failure factor are reduced by 14.12% and 24.18%, respectively, improving the blade bearing capacity effectively.