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Abstract

The present work studies the advantages of applying a sandwich construction as opposed to traditional single skin composites in the flanges of a load carrying spar in a future 180 m wind turbine rotor. A parametric finite element model is used to analyze two basic designs with single skin and sandwich flanges, respectively. Buckling is by far the governing criterion for the single skin design. Introducing a sandwich construction results in a globally more flexible structure making tower clearance the critical criterion. Significant weight reduction up to 22.3% and increased buckling capacity is obtained. Moreover, the study showed that proper choice of core material is important to prevent face wrinkling. Geometric nonlinear analysis showed sensitivity to imperfections. A consistent submodeling technique is presented for verifying the response from the global model in any section of interest.

Keywords

buckling sandwich FEA sensitivity analysis wind turbine blades.

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Application and Analysis of Sandwich Elements in the Primary Structure of Large Wind Turbine Blades

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