Structural design of waste-thermoplastic wind turbine blade

Wind turbine blades are unrecyclable at end of life, which has led to the testing of thermoplastics to replace thermosets in the composite; thus making recycling possible. Another challenge, waste plastics of which 55% of all plastics produced in 2015 were discarded into the environment. Utilising waste thermoplastics for producing wind turbine blades may reduce waste plastics. Research into designing, manufacturing and testing of thermoplastic composite wind turbine blades is being conducted. Other industries are involved in the production of resins as well, such as Arkema Inc. who produced the Elium thermoplastic utilized in other large scale experiments. In this study, the structural performance of various resin types for composite blade is depicted. The application, Ansys Mechanical APDL and BladeComp are utilized in obtaining mass, deflection and von mises stress in the spar flange for the 70m/s Extreme Wind speed Model case and 19.61m/s Extreme Operating Gust load case. From the results, it is clear, for similar parameters that waste-thermoplastic blade results in 2 times the blade deflection of that of a thermoset-impregnated fibre blade. For 70m/s case, stress within the blade exceeded the unfactored strength capacity of the blade. However, if 50m/s is utilised, the stresses fall below the unfactored strength capacity. Furthermore, stresses in the blade due to Extreme Operating Gust show that minimal addition of material may bring stress to below factored strength capacity for waste-thermoplastic.

Author dc:creator

• Akpoviroro Akpoghor 1984-

Contributors dc:contributor

• Háskólinn í Reykjavík

• Meistaraprófsritgerðir
• Orkuverkfræði
• Vindmyllur
• Plast
• Varmi
• Endurvinnsla
• Sustainable energy engineering
• Wind turbines
• Blades
• Thermoplastics
• Recycling

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1946/45917

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:skemman.is:1946/45917